Plinko

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This contestant is about to play Plinko, and can win up to $50,000.

Plinko is a pricing game on the American television game show The Price Is Right. Debuting on January 3, 1983, it is played for a cash prize of up to $50,000, and uses small prizes. It is frequently said to be the most popular of all the pricing games.

1 Gameplay
2 Odds of winning $50,000
3 Gameplay changes
4 Trivia
5 Foreign versions of Plinko
6 See also

[edit] Gameplay

Plinko is one of the most popular pricing games on The Price Is Right. The game—somewhat loosely based on a bagatelle game—is celebrated for its simplicity and potential for large cash winnings.

To start this two-stage game, the contestant receives a "Plinko chip" to use on the Plinko board. The contestant can earn up to four more chips using the small prizes that are presented one at a time.

For each prize, the contestant receives an incorrect price, such as $57, for example. The contestant must decide whether the first digit or the last digit is correct (for example, $5_ or $_7). A correct guess nets the player another chip.

After all four prizes are played, the contestant receives any additional chips, is told of their maximum potential winnings, and climbs to the top of the Plinko board. The Plinko board is a pegged board, which sends each chip flying across and down the board until it lands in one of nine slots at the bottom of the board. Those nine slots are, left to right: $100; $500; $1,000; $0; $10,000; $0; $1,000; $500; and $100.

Occasionally, a chip will become stuck on a peg. If that happens, Bob will use his trusty "Plinko Stick" to dislodge it (or simply reach up and nudge it loose if it's within arm's length). The stuck chip does not count when it lands, and it is returned to the player to try again.

The contestant keeps the cash earned after having exhausted the supply of Plinko chips. The maximum amount a contestant can win is $50,000; this is accomplished by landing all five Plinko chips in the slot worth $10,000.

[edit] Odds of winning $50,000

Assuming a chip has an equal chance of falling left or right upon hitting a peg, the outcome should follow a reflected Binomial distribution, or approximately that of a "bell curve."

The optimal strategy mathematically is to drop the chip down the center of the board, between the fourth and fifth pegs from the left in the top row. With this strategy, the odds of a chip landing in the $10,000 slot are 231 in 1024, or about 22.56%, and the odds of winning $50,000 are approximately 0.0584%.

However, if no particular strategy is used and assuming the board randomizes perfectly, the odds of winning $50,000 are 1 in 59,049, or about 0.0017%. With this in mind, Plinko's top prize is virtually impossible to win. However, fans often count this game as a win if the contestant hits the $10,000 space at least once.

The closest anyone ever came to actually winning the top prize was $21,000 on November 30, 1990, in the days of the $5,000 slot; $23,000 with the current $10,000 slot; and $40,000 on primetime specials with the $20,000 slot.

[edit] Gameplay changes

[edit] Top prize adjustments

When Plinko was introduced in 1983, the top prize was $25,000; the center space was $5,000.

The $5,000 slot was increased to $10,000 for the first time during the 25th-anniversary primetime special in 1996. The change was subsequently made to the regular daytime series in the fall of 1998.

1994's syndicated The New Price Is Right did not use the board layout described above. Some episodes featured a layout as thus: $2,500-$500-$1,000-$0-$5,000-$0-$1,000-$500-$2,500. Other episodes had $500-$1,000-$0-$5,000-$0-$5,000-$0-$1,000-$500. The top prize was still $25,000, as in the daytime show. If the second syndicated board layout (with its two $5,000 spaces) had been used during one mid-'90s daytime playing, it would have resulted in a full $25,000 win.

On primetime specials beginning with the Military Specials in 2002, the center slot is worth $20,000, for a top prize of $100,000. The top prize was also $100,000 when this game was played on the Gameshow Marathon.

On the 30th Anniversary Special, Plinko's top prize was determined by the result of Triple Play earlier in the show (a factor which was not mentioned on the air); a win meant that it would be played for $50,000, while a loss meant that it would be played for $100,000. Triple Play was won, so Plinko was played for $50,000.

[edit] Game Introductions

Plinko has had several different intros over the years, as follows:

On the game's first playing only, a disco ball with "$25,000" circling around it was lowered from the ceiling in front of the audience. The introductory cue for the $25,000 reveal was the tail end of the "Family Feud" theme, the same portion used to this day as the $10,000 reveal music for Grand Game. Following this, the tail end of a TPIR cue titled "Starcrossed" played as the Race Game Curtain lifted up to reveal the Plinko board.[1]

The familiar Plinko sign debuted on the game's second playing. At first, it was staged in the back of the audience, and initially displayed the game's title on a series of horizontal panels that then flipped around to display "$25,000" (and in later years, "$50,000" or "$100,000"). Later in 1983, the sign was moved to the turntable, where it remained for 19 years; it was returned to the audience for the Davidson version of the show, since its set didn't include the turntable. Also new in this reveal was the removal of the "Family Feud" theme and the addition of a short harp piece (which would change twice in the mid-'90s) followed by a portion of a popular TPIR music cue called "The Cats".

In December of 2002, the sign was retired in favor of a simple "$50,000" graphic that appears on the bottom of the screen; shortly thereafter, the upbeat sting from the music cue "The Cats" was also removed from the intro, leaving only the harp music.

[edit] Other

On its first playing, Bob referred to the Plinko chips as "discs".

When first introduced, the Plinko board was completely exposed, meaning that the chips were occasionally able to bounce off of the board and onto the stage; chips that did this were returned to the contestant for him to drop again. To remedy this problem, a Plexiglas sheet was placed over the board; however, this led to the problem of chips being difficult to retrieve if they got stuck on the pegs. The board now has a perforated Plexiglas sheet that stops chips from flying out and still allows stuck chips to be knocked loose.

The 1994 syndicated version used the "higher/lower" format for the small prizes instead of the "correct digit" format, since it wanted to use three-digit prizes.

When Plinko was played on Gameshow Marathon, a special rule allowed the fourth small prize, a Dell DJ Ditty MP3 Player, to be awarded to every member of the audience if the contestant won its Plinko chip. The chip and prize were won.

[edit] Trivia

If Plinko is the first pricing game of the day, Bob will enter the studio from the audience since the setup blocks his normal entrance.

On the game's first playing, Bob explained that the name "Plinko" came from the sound the chips made as they came down the board ("plink plink plink plink"). He then quipped, "some of our people drink, and that's how they come up with these names."

In terms of having a "perfect show," winning Plinko requires winning the top prize announced in the game's introduction, which is currently $50,000; as such, Plinko has never been won. If anyone ever does win Plinko, the clangs and whoops generally associated with huge wins will be played.

On the other hand, there have been a few contestants over the years who won no money at all, including at least one who had all five Plinko chips.
The $21,000 win in 1990 was the second-highest possible amount that could be won (when $5000 was the center slot).

During a playing of Plinko in 2000, one of the contestant's chips landed in the $10,000 slot and then flopped over the separator into a 0. As the chip's actual landing point was $10,000, Bob awarded the contestant the money.

[edit] Foreign versions of Plinko

On the UK's Bruce's Price is Right and its current The Price Is Right, Portugal's O Preço Certo Em Euros, and the Netherlands' Cash en Carlo, Plinko is played differently. Instead of playing for cash, they play for a bonus prize (usually a car in the UK). On those shows, once all the chips are used, a model replaces the cash amounts with "Win/Lose/Win/Lose/Win/Lose", although contestants on the UK show had the choice of keeping the money and not going for this gamble. If "Win" is hit, the player keeps the cash and wins the prize. If "Lose" is hit, the player doesn't get the prize and loses the money. On the UK show's final season in 2001, there were also two spaces with pound signs. If either one of those were hit, the player didn't win the prize, but they won double the money they had already earned.

In the UK, to earn discs, the player had to determine which of two prices was correct for one particular item. He or she could add up to three more in addition to the one disc given at the start. In the early days of Bruce's Price Is Right, the American method of pricing was used. In Portugal, the player has to determine if the price of the given product is true or false, and he or she can earn up to four discs.

The money slots on the UK version were £250 and £500 (meaning the max is £2000, £4000 in 2001), though in earlier series five discs instead of four could be earned, meaning the max was £2500 pounds. Portugal's version has amounts of €100 and €200 (meaning the max is €1000). Only one UK contestant, Emon, managed to win the max of £2000 in 1999. He quit with the money instead of playing for a motorcycle; Bruce had him drop the chip anyway, and it turned out that he would have lost.

The current UK version of The Price Is Right has amounts of £50, £100, and £150, for a max of £600. Aside from this difference, its rules are the same as those from the first six series of Bruce's Price Is Right. There has also been one case where a chip got stuck -- and it still counted after being dislodged. (On this version, there is no Plinko Stick; Joe simply shakes the board.) The game has an Asian theme, although no rationale has been determined for this design choice.

Germany's version of Plinko was also played differently. The game offered no cash and was instead played for three prizes. The contestant was given one chip and could earn up to three more by winning small prizes. The board had seven slots, numbered 3-2-0-1-0-2-3. Hitting a "3" with a chip meant the contestant won the least expensive prize, "2" meant he won the middle-priced prize, and "1" meant he won the most expensive prize. Landing in "0", of course, won nothing with that chip.

Still other countries' versions of the show, including Mexico's Atínale al Precio, Italy's OK, il Prezzo è Giusto!, France's Le Juste Prix, and Vietnam's Hãy chọn giá đúng, have done their best to emulate the American format of Plinko, with differences in the cash prizes offered being the only significant changes (25,000 pesos is the max in Mexico, 10,000,000 lira is the max in Italy, 100,000 francs is the max in France, and 10,000 diem (10,000,000 dong) is the max in Vietnam); perhaps most notably, the lowest value on Vietnam's Plinko board is 200 diem (200,000 Vietnamese dong, only about US$13), making it impossible to walk away from the game empty-handed.