Notes on the board
Four pieces that did not fit on the main pages, each answering a question people actually type.
One board, fourteen bounces, fifteen slots
Where plinko came from
First played on television on 3 January 1983, devised by the show's executive producer, named after a sound. The television board put its biggest prize in the middle; screen boards put theirs at the edges. That inversion is the whole difference.
One board, fourteen bounces, fifteen slots
A cardboard board and a screen are not the same game
How to build a working pin board in an afternoon, what a hundred discs will show you, and the one thing a home board has no equivalent for.
One board, fourteen bounces, fifteen slots
Mines, dice and a falling ball
Three games filed in the same drawer. Where the decision sits in each, why only one of them lets you choose during the round, and why that still does not change the percentage.
One board, fourteen bounces, fifteen slots
Turbo plinko: faster rounds, same maths
A switch that touches no odds at all and is still the most consequential control on the board.
One board, fourteen bounces, fifteen slots
Why these four and not others
Each of these started as a question people type into a search box, and each one survived a test: could we say something about it that was not already on the first page of results.
Plenty of questions did not survive. "Plinko tricks" and "how to win every time" are asked constantly, and the honest answer to both is a single paragraph that already sits on the page about what changes a result — a fourteen-bounce board has nothing to trick. Spreading that paragraph into an article would have produced a page that exists to fill a menu.
So there are four pieces here rather than ten. That is not modesty about the game; it is what the demand actually supports once the questions that share an answer are folded together.
One board, fourteen bounces, fifteen slots
How the figures in these pieces were arrived at
Every multiplier ladder quoted across this site was read off a working board in September 2026 and can be pointed at. Every probability was calculated from the pin count, with the calculation shown and its one assumption named: that each bounce is an even split.
Two of these pieces lean on outside sources rather than the board — the history of the television game, and the prize ceilings it carried through the 1980s. Those are cited at the foot of the piece that uses them, with links, so you can check them rather than take our word.
Where a figure would have needed a source we could not point at, we left the gap. There are several, and they are marked.
