When it drops

The useful question is where it usually drops, and that needs a log

Asking when a jackpot will drop has no answer, because the trigger is random and carries no memory. Asking where pools have historically been sitting when they were won does have an answer, and it is a genuinely useful one. It just requires a record that nobody keeps, so this page builds it from the drops in your own log and refuses to report anything until there are enough of them.

A percentile tells you the pool is unusual. It never tells you it is due.

5
drops before a range is reported
0
predictions produced from it
1
case where pool size changes the maths

Your range

Built from the drops in your log, and nothing else

The method

What is being computed, and what it refuses to compute

Only entries marked as a drop are used. Sightings are ignored here entirely, because the value a pool happened to hold when somebody glanced at it is not evidence about where pools get won.

From those drops the page reports the smallest, the median and the largest, and where your most recent sighting falls inside that spread. The median is used rather than the mean because a single unusually large drop distorts a mean built from a handful of values, and a handful is what you will have.

Below five drops nothing is reported as a range. Two or three values do not describe a distribution, and printing a percentile from them would be inventing precision. The page says how many more you need instead.

A percentile is not a probability. If the current pool sits above 80% of recorded drops, that means it is unusually large compared with the ones you have seen. It does not mean it is 80% of the way to dropping, and it does not raise the chance of the next spin triggering it. For an ordinary progressive the trigger has no memory of the pool size at all.

The one structure where the current value genuinely changes what a spin is worth is a pool with a published ceiling. That case has its own arithmetic and its own page: must drop jackpots.

Questions

Frequently asked

How many drops do I need before the range means anything?

Five is the minimum this page will report on and it is a low bar. Ten or more gives a median that stops moving much with each new entry. The page always prints the count next to the range so you can judge it yourself rather than trusting the number.

If the pool is above the usual drop range, is it due?

No. That intuition is the gambler's fallacy in its most common form. An ordinary progressive triggers on a fixed probability per qualifying spin, which does not rise as the pool grows. A pool sitting above its usual range is unusual, and unusual is not the same as due.

Why not use the average instead of the median?

Because a jackpot drop distribution is right skewed and your sample will be small. One large drop drags a mean of eight values a long way, while the median barely moves. On a sample of a few dozen the median is the more honest summary.

Can I use somebody else's drop data?

Only if you know how it was collected. Figures posted in groups and forums are volunteered, which means large drops are reported far more often than ordinary ones. A range built from volunteered wins is biased upward, and that is exactly the bias this page is meant to avoid.

Related

What the range does not cover

A drop range describes one pool. Three things it says nothing about are worked out elsewhere.

The case where the current value does matter

A pool with a published ceiling has to be paid before it gets there, which makes a high value genuinely worth more per spin. The calculation is on this site.

What the waiting costs while you watch it grow

Every spin taken while a pool climbs costs the house edge on that spin. The per hour figure is the price of the strategy of waiting.

Whether your own results mean anything yet

The same sample size question applied to your own wins and losses, with a confidence interval and an explicit statement of when it is too wide to support a conclusion.

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Disclosure: this site is run by a U88 affiliate and earns a commission on accounts opened through the link above. A page that tells you a jackpot number cannot be predicted also carries a link to open an account, and both of those are true at once. Nothing on this site runs on a server, and the arithmetic does not change because of who published it. U88's minimum deposit is RM30. 18+.