Plinko is a game that the ball drops through a series of pegs and lands in a slot with a multiplier. The two most popular versions are from Spribe (RTP ~97%) and BGaming (RTP ~99%). Here's a free simulator to illustrate why some slots pay out very infrequently and others pay out quite regularly. At each peg the ball goes either left or right at random so no trick can influence it. This is an independent site which explains the Plinko game in Sri Lanka for adults 18+ only.
Drop the Ball: Plinko Simulator
Our Plinko game simulator uses virtual balls (no money), the same left or right randomness as the real game and is otherwise identical to the real game. Have a go at these three things:
- Drop 100 balls and the bell shape will emerge.
- Switch to 8 rows and then to 16 rows and see how the balls spread out.
- Switch from low to high risk and compare the multipliers at the edges with the ones in the middle.
Want to see the chances in figures? Open the Plinko calculator to see the probability of each slot.
Why Most Balls Land in the Middle
In online Plinko the ball hits a peg in each row and at each peg it has an equal chance to go left or right. To end up in an edge pocket you have to go the same way at every single row which is very rare. There are far more paths to the middle than any of the edge pockets so the middle is by far the most popular.
Take a board with 8 rows. The ball has 256 equally likely paths from top to bottom and only one of those paths ends in each edge slot. The rest of the paths disperse towards the centre where there is a lot of overlap. That's why the edge slots have the biggest multipliers.
What We Saw After 10,000 Drops
We ran the board simulator with 10,000 virtual balls, using a single number of rows and a single risk level for the whole run and simply counted how many balls ended up in each slot.
| Slot | Multiplier | Share of balls |
|---|---|---|
| Slot 1 | 13x | 0.34% |
| Slot 2 | 3x | 3.27% |
| Slot 3 | 1.3x | 10.65% |
| Slot 4 | 0.7x | 21.78% |
| Slot 5 | 0.4x | 27.37% |
| Slot 6 | 0.7x | 21.85% |
| Slot 7 | 1.3x | 11.24% |
| Slot 8 | 3x | 3.14% |
| Slot 9 | 13x | 0.36% |
The result was exactly as the bell curve would predict: the middle pockets took by far the most balls and the edge pockets took very few indeed. A different run would be different in detail but would still conform to the same shape as the bell curve since at each peg the ball still has an equal chance of going left or right.
Choose Your Settings: Rows and Risk
- Rows: more rows means more rows at the bottom and a greater dispersion of multipliers. The ball has more places to land and the gap between the smallest and the largest payout increases.
- Risk level: higher risk means bigger multipliers at the edges and smaller ones in the middle, so you'll win less often but the wins will be bigger. Lower risk means the multipliers are more consistent throughout and the wins will be more frequent but smaller.
Neither of the settings affects the long term return (which is determined by the game's RTP) so the details are in the rows and risk levels page.
