Let’s just say that a Sewell, NJ, woman’s conference call at work earlier this month didn’t go quite as planned.
She got on the call. She listened to the call. She went to PlaySugarHouse.com during the call. She put a $2 bet on Divine Fortune and won $287,945.23, the largest jackpot ever captured via a New Jersey online slots game.
SugarHouse’s blog published some of the details of the big win, making sure they added their marketing spin to the final sentence:
“This is the biggest prize one person has won on Divine Fortune. Divine Fortune is a 5-reel, 3-row, 20-line (fixed) video slot that can make any one person’s life drastically change overnight!”
The Press of Atlantic City reported that a press release said the lucky woman went to a SugarHouse chat room after the win and expressed her astonishment.
While we could not confirm that the post was authentic, here is what it was reported to say:
“I was actually on a work conference call and almost screamed at [sic] loud.”
Divine Fortune strikes again
The woman, whose name was not revealed at the time of publishing, won her nearly $288,000 jackpot on what can now be considered the premier jackpot slots game: Divine Fortune.
In the past year, the slots game has accounted for some massive online jackpots. The New Jersey Division of Gaming Enforcement (DGE) publishes monthly year-to-date tallies of all slots jackpots of more than $50,000, including land-based and online slots.
According to the numbers published earlier this month, Divine Fortune has accounted for 10 jackpots of $50,000 or more, with six of those 10 resulting in wins of more than $100,000.
Online slots jackpots surpass $1.8 million in 2018
Per the DGE’s July report, there were 200 jackpots of $50,000 for the year, 5 percent of which were from Divine Fortune.
The jackpots via Divine Fortune ranged from $50,000 to $240,000 and were spread across a few NJ gambling sites:
- Jan. 21: BetfairCasino.com (now FanDuel NJ), $107,080.00
- March 1: GoldenNuggetCasino.com, $115,705.00
- March 11: GoldenNuggetCasino.com, $50,735.00
- March 17: BetfairCasino.com, $116,443.00
- March 27: PlaySugarHouse.com, $193,737.00
- April 4: PlaySugarHouse.com, $61,263.00
- May 4: MoheganSunCasino.com, $59,815.00
- June 6: GoldenNuggetCasino.com, $240,026.67
- July 1: GoldenNuggetCasino.com, $131,969.00
- July 3: PlayMGM.com, $66,635.00
These 10 wins combined for more than $1.8 million in winnings for Divine Fortune.
Because the conference room jackpot occurred on Aug. 2, it was not included in the DGE’s most recent list of jackpots through July.
However, the recent jackpot was the biggest one since August 2017, at which point a woman named Susan won a $271,268 jackpot via … you guessed it … Divine Fortune.
Online slots continue to grow
What makes this year interesting so far is that around 20 percent of the jackpots have come via NJ online casino slots, whereas 10 percent of 2017’s $50K+ jackpots came from online play.
The emergence of online slots as a way for those in New Jersey to win big jackpots will be a useful backup plan during months in which inclement weather is frequent and gamblers stay away from casinos because of it.
February is a good example of this because casino revenues were down because of historically bad weather. However, revenue numbers from the DGE indicated that a jump in online slots revenue that month tempered the industry’s overall losses.