BGaming’s 8-row payout tables. Play money only: each drop is random and nothing is staked.
LAST DROPS
Here we cover Plinko, the casino game where a ball drops through rows of pegs into a multiplier pocket. You’ll see how each risk level spreads the payouts, the RTP every provider publishes, and what 1,000 drops look like against the maths. Stakes and payouts are in AUD, and the board game sold at Big W has its own page if that’s the Plinko you had in mind.
The casinos that offer Plinko to Australians are offshore, and we check each one before it gets a button here
Online casinos are not licensed in Australia. When a casino clears our checks it gets a button, marked as sponsored; a commission never changes our figures. 18+ · Gamble responsibly.
A Plinko board is a triangle of pegs over a row of pockets. The ball starts at the top and, at every row, bounces left or right with an even chance. After the last row it drops into a pocket, and your bet is multiplied by the number on that pocket.
The number of rows sets the odds, and they can be worked out exactly. On 8 rows the ball can take 256 different paths. Seventy of them end in the middle pocket, so it catches 27.3% of balls. Only one path reaches each edge, so each edge pocket gets 0.39%, about one ball in 256. That’s why the middle pays the least and the edges pay the most.
Every drop is independent. The board has no memory, and the last ten balls say nothing about the next one.
Changing the risk level doesn’t change where the ball goes. It changes what each pocket pays. Here’s BGaming’s 8-row board, edge to centre 3:
| Risk | Edge → centre | Drops that return less than your stake |
|---|---|---|
| Low | 5.6× · 2.1× · 1.1× · 1× · 0.5× | 27.3% |
| Medium (BGaming: Normal) | 13× · 3× · 1.3× · 0.7× · 0.4× | 71.1% |
| High | 29× · 4× · 1.5× · 0.3× · 0.2× | 71.1% |
All three return about 99% over time. What changes is the swing: on High, seven drops in ten lose something, and the rare edge hits make up for it. Spribe does the same job with coloured balls instead of a risk menu, and its red ball’s centre pocket pays nothing at all 4.
Return to player (RTP) is the share of all stakes a game pays back over a very long run. These are the figures from each provider’s own files, and I recalculated every table from the exact odds to make sure they match:
| Version | Rows | Risk | RTP | Top multiplier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| BGaming Plinko | 8–16 | Low, Normal, High | 99% on the game page; 98.91–99.16% in the rules 2 | 1,000× |
| Spribe Plinko | 12, 14, 16 | Green, Yellow, Red ball | 97% (house edge 3%) 4 | 555× |
The gap matters more than it looks. On $1,000 staked over an evening of fast drops, a 99% game keeps about $10 on average and a 97% game about $30. The full comparison, including Stake’s in-house version, is on the RTP and risk levels page. Weighing Plinko against Mines or a crash game such as Aviator? The Plinko vs Mines and crash games page lines up their RTP, pace and how much each one asks you to decide.
I ran 1,000 drops at $1 each on BGaming’s 8-row Medium table. The exact odds said the middle pocket should catch about 273 balls; it caught 292. The two 13× edges should have caught about four each; they caught five and one. The session returned $964.10 for $1,000 staked, a little below the 98.91% the table returns over a very long run.
A 16-row High session went the other way: $1,086.40 back for $1,000, thanks to a 130× hit, after sitting $73 down at its lowest. Both are normal. Over 1,000 drops the swings are far bigger than the house edge, which only shows up over many thousands. Try it yourself in the simulator; all seven of my sessions are on the strategy page.
Pick a version, rows and risk, and drop 1,000 balls on the providers' real tables. No account, no money.
Drop 1,000 free ballsCasino Plinko for real money is offered by online casinos, and online casinos are not licensed in Australia. Offering them to people in Australia is prohibited under the Interactive Gambling Act 2001; the law targets the operators and advertisers, not players 5. The casinos that accept Australians are offshore, and the Australian Communications and Media Authority blocks their sites in batches.
That shapes what to check before depositing anywhere: which version the lobby runs and at which RTP, the licence the casino shows in its own footer, how withdrawals really work, and whether the site is on ACMA’s blocked list. We check casinos from an Australian connection before any of them gets a button here, and none has one yet. The real-money page has the checklist and what we’ve found so far.
Recreational gambling winnings are not taxed in Australia (ATO ruling IT 2655) 6.
The casino versions are “provably fair”: before each drop the game commits to a hidden server seed, and afterwards you can check that the seed, your own client seed and the round number produce the path the ball took. That proves the result wasn’t changed after you bet. It doesn’t change the house edge, which is built into the payout table in plain sight. The provably fair guide shows how to run the check.
Most “Plinko scam” searches are about something else: phone apps that promise PayPal cash for dropping balls between ads. Those aren’t the casino game, and our Plinko apps page explains what they are.
Casino Plinko borrows its name and board from the game made famous by the American show The Price Is Right, and the physics goes back to the Galton board, a 19th-century demonstration of how random bounces pile up into a bell curve. Tabletop Plinko boards sold in Australia, such as the Jenjo board at Big W, are the same idea without the multipliers. The board game page covers the toy, the TV show and how it differs from Japanese pachinko.
The maths is completely open: you can know the exact chance of every pocket before you drop.
Returns are high for a casino game: 97% on Spribe’s version and 98.91% to 99.16% on BGaming’s.
You choose the ride: Low risk keeps results close to your stake, High risk chases 1,000×.
Provably fair versions let you check each drop after it lands.
It’s fast. Auto mode can run hundreds of drops in minutes, so a small house edge adds up.
On High risk most drops lose money: 71% on 8 rows, 79% on 16.
Online casinos are not licensed in Australia, so the usual local protections, BetStop included, don’t cover them.
Plinko is the most honest-looking game in a casino lobby, and on the maths it mostly earns that. Every table I checked adds up to the RTP its provider publishes, the odds of every pocket are fixed by the number of rows, and the best versions return about 99%.
My pick is BGaming’s Plinko for its return and its range of settings. Learn it in the free simulator first, where 1,000 drops take a second and cost nothing. If you then play for real money, read the RTP in the game’s own info screen, set a deposit limit, and remember the casino is offshore. The checks worth doing first are on the real-money page.