Plinko Explained: How the Game Works, RTP and Risk Levels

Plinko is a “ball drop” game: you drop a ball from the top of a triangular board, it bounces off row after row of pegs, and it lands in a slot at the bottom — each slot is a multiplier of your stake. There are no reels and no cards, and the rules take a minute to learn. This guide explains how a round plays out, what the number of rows and the risk level change, the RTP of the well-known versions, and where to find the game.

Where does Plinko come from?

According to Spribe, Plinko comes from a popular American TV game show and found a new life in crypto casinos before spreading to online casinos generally. Many studios now make their own version: Spribe classes Plinko as a “mini game”, like Aviator, and BGaming released its Plinko on 28 January 2019.

How to play Plinko

1. Choose your stake per ball.
2. Set up the board if the game allows it: the number of peg rows and, in many versions, a risk level (low, medium, high).
3. Drop the ball. At every peg it bounces left or right at random until it reaches the bottom.
4. Get paid by slot: the payout is your stake times the multiplier of the slot the ball lands in. Middle slots usually carry low multipliers (sometimes below 1x, meaning you get back less than you staked); the slots at the two edges carry the highest.

Most versions have autoplay to drop many balls in a row with the same settings. Each ball is its own round.

What do rows and risk level change?

Because the ball bounces randomly at each peg, most balls land near the middle and only a few travel all the way to an edge. That is why middle multipliers are low and edge multipliers are high. Spribe notes that players can adjust the number of pins to change the game’s difficulty; more rows means more slots at the bottom and a wider spread of multipliers. A high risk level typically pushes the middle multipliers lower in exchange for higher ones at the edges.

In other words, rows and risk level mainly change volatility: a low-risk setup pays smaller amounts more evenly, while a high-risk setup gives many drops that return less than the stake, mixed with the occasional edge hit. The multiplier table for each setup is always shown on the game screen.

Plinko RTP

RTP differs by version:

• BGaming Plinko: 99% RTP, maximum multiplier x1,000.
• Spribe Plinko: 97% RTP.

These are theoretical returns over a very large volume of bets, not what a single session will produce. The ball’s path is decided at random, and one drop has no effect on the next. BGaming itself describes Plinko as “extremely elementary and random”, with no specific betting strategies.

Plinko and provably fair

Many Plinko versions, especially at crypto casinos, use a provably fair system: each drop’s result is generated from hash chains that you can check yourself after the round. Plinko in BC.GAME’s BC Originals range works this way — the same approach as many crash games.

Where to play Plinko

• 22bet: type “plinko” into the slots lobby search and dozens of versions come up, including BGaming’s Plinko, Plinko 2 and Plinko XY, SmartSoft’s Plinko X Classic and Pragmatic Play’s Triple Pot Plinko Hercules.
• BC.GAME: its own provably fair Plinko in the BC Originals range.

Another mini game built on the same idea of cashing out before you lose the stake is Mines, where every multiplier can be worked out exactly.

Playing responsibly

A single drop takes seconds, and autoplay can drop hundreds of balls in a row, so the amount staked in a session grows very quickly. Set a limit on drops and a budget before you switch on autoplay, only play with money you can afford to lose, and treat Plinko as entertainment with a cost, not a source of income.