The month’s biggest announcement came from the likes of Microgaming powered casinos within the Fortune Lounge Group who, along with the software provider’s other casino properties will be hosing The Grand Slam of Slots tournament, which is the web’s richest online slots competition…ever!

Not only will slots enthusiast have a shot at the first prize of €1,000,000 but will also stand the chance to win a number of cars and additional prizes to the value of $415,000 while playing slots online. Never in the history of the online casino industry has there ever been a slots tournament of this extent been held across a casino network, but one thing is for sure, it is definitely turning heads across the globe!

While this seems like the most exciting promotion ever launched, before you get caught up in the hype, there are a number of issues to consider before entering this type of tournament.

To start off with, remember that casinos are businesses and as such everything they do is strategic and have a business related orientation.  So they will never give away over €1 million in prizes, cars and cash without ensuring that they will cover the costs of those and make a profit.  Within this tournament schedule there are vast numbers of qualifying rounds which will be played by huge numbers of people from all over the world and of course each round will feature re-buy options which add to the pot.

Then of course, as anyone who has ever participated in a slots tournament will tell you, these things tend to take a great deal of time, especially if you don’t have an invitation to the later stages of the competition and you have to start off in the initial Freerolls.  From experience we can tell you that each Freeroll round takes approximately 5 minutes, often with up to 10 re-buy options in each, meaning that you can spend up to 50 minutes per round.  In addition, you are bound to a single slot for the duration of the tournament and those spin quite slowly as there is no “quick play” option which can be engaged to speed up the game play.  Not only do  Freerolls taking time, they also present you lower odds of winning, this is due to the fact that these tournaments are held across the entire Microgaming network with hundreds of thousands of slots players taking part and competing against you.

Although we’ve highlighted the negative aspects above, of course there are a number of positive aspects with these kind of tournaments too, otherwise they wouldn’t exist at all! The biggest plus is that the tournament is relatively cheap to enter and participate in.  Another positive point is that you get to play for long periods without paying too much which is not the case with progressive jackpot machines which are able to offer this kind of prize.  Then there is the event that you may get lucky enough in the tournament to win, and just like buying a lottery ticket, imagining what to do with the money can make for a great deal of entertainment in itself.

No matter what you do, if you decide to take part in the tournament that is taking the industry by storm, bear in mind this one final tip: if possible, try to enter the tournament in a later stage and buy-in to the qualifying round.  And one more thing…have fun!