A New Jersey resident playing at the Hard Rock Online Casino recently hit a jackpot to the tune of $230,000. Gary M, who was laid off from work not long ago, won the massive prize with a $5 bet on the popular Divine Fortune online slot game, which has an average return-to-player percentage (RTP) of 96.6%.
It marks the second big jackpot win on Divine Fortune in the space of a month. On St Patrick’s Day, a woman named Netty collected a cool $278,802 with a $2 bet on the same game at the SugarHouse Online Casino.
Gary M’s win continues a trend of huge jackpot hauls at New Jersey online casinos this year. In the early part of February, the Borgata Online Casino dished out two $800,000 jackpots.
With the state’s land-based casinos closing their doors in mid-March, there has been a sharp increase in online gaming activity. So far this year there have been 17 six-figure slots jackpots won at NJ casino sites.
The largest jackpot win of 2019 occurred in March, when a player struck a $667,800 kitty playing the Lotusland slot game at BorgataOnline.com. The total jackpot wins at online and land-based casinos last year came in at $54.7 million. That was up from $39.9 million from the previous year, largely due to significant growth in online play.
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Jackpot wins are defined as any single payout of at least $50,000. In 2019 there were 611 jackpots won at New Jersey’s land-based and online casinos. That number is a significant increase over the 384 jackpot winners in 2018.
According to state figures, there were 143 jackpots won in the first three months of 2020 for a combined win total of $17.6 million. New Jersey is on pace for 430 jackpot wins this year, which would be a decrease from 2019. However, total prize money won from jackpots is on pace for over $53 million despite the closure of the Atlantic City casinos.
Last year the online casinos in New Jersey had a handle of $461.7 million on slot games and table games, marking an increase of some 66.5% over the previous year. To compare, the handle for land-based casinos in 2019 on slot machines was $1.92 billion, which was a 6.7% increase over 2018.
Online casino gambling has been legal in New Jersey since 2013. However, the land-based casinos in Atlantic City have been around since the 1970s. It will take time before the revenue from internet casinos overtakes land-based casino revenue, but that appears to be a likely outcome down the track.