‘The Price Is Right’: Expert Explains Where Plinko Players Go Wrong

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An engineer explained where hundreds of The Price Is Right players go wrong when they play the beloved game, Plinko. The expert told Reddit users exactly where to stand when playing the game and the mechanics of it.

Robert B. Hayes, PhD, CHP, PE, is an Associate Professor of Nuclear Engineering at North Carolina State University, a Fellow of the Health Physics Society, and a Fellow of the American Physical Society. He posed the question, “How does the normal distribution generator work?”

With a smaller version of the game, Hayes demonstrated that the beads start at the bottom. “But, as they flow through the top, they hit little pins as they fall down,” he said.

“So, they have to juggle between all of the different pins. As they go down the pins, they either have to go to the left or to the right of each pin as they hit. It’s very unlikely that they are going to go to the right every time, so you have very few all the way to the right and the same with the left,” he said.

“It’s more than likely that they will come all the way down, and you’ll get the bulk of the beads right in the middle. What’s happening is that we’re measuring the probability of the beads falling into any one of the distributions.”

“The Central Limit Therom tells us that this normal distribution is what you actually expect when you’re taking a sample of the average of the distribution,” he ended.

What is the science behind Plinko?
byu/Comfortable_Tutor_43 inThePriceIsRight

Plinko is probably The Price Is Right‘s most popular game. It debuted in January 1983. Contestants play for a cash prize of up to $50,000. It also awards prizes valued under $100. The game show contestant is given a flat disc called a Plinko chip, and can earn up to five chips if they correctly guess prices of grocery items. They then walk to the top of the board and let go of the chips into different slots to try and win the top prize, but where they drop it might not be where it lands, as demonstrated above. As the video below shows, the game can be brutal:

 

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“Your best bet is to always drop the chip right in the middle of the board. I always get a good chuckle out of contestants who spend time asking the audience where to drop them,” a Reddit user said.

“Right but doesn’t the outcome rely heavily on the layout of the pegs? Every plinko board I’ve seen has no distinct shape like the one shown here,” another fan asked.

“All plinko boards use this same layout. It’s essentially triangles. The main difference here, is that the balls are all launched from the middle. If everyone dropped their chip exactly in the middle each time, it’s more likely to go down the middle. Most forget that the two ZEROS are there right next to the big money. The zeros are there to match the likely normal distribution. For as often as we will see big money, we’ll also see zeros,” a Reddit user replied to them.