The price of an hour
Plinko is fast. At a relaxed twenty drops a minute, an hour is 1,200 drops; with auto-bet on it can be three times that. Multiply drops by your bet and by the house edge (about 1%) and you get the expected cost of the session โ the amount you should think of as the entertainment fee, in the same way you would price a night at the cinema.
The "typical swing" is one standard deviation of the session result: about two thirds of sessions finish within that distance of the expected result. It grows with the square root of the number of drops and with the paytable's per-drop deviation (0.33ร on low risk, 6.6ร on high risk at 16 rows), which is why an hour on high risk can feel like a completely different game from an hour on low risk despite costing the same on average.
Using it well
- Decide the hourly cost you are happy to pay before you open the game, and set the bet from that.
- Halving the drop rate (turn off auto-bet, watch the ball) halves the cost per hour with no change to the game.
- Compare the hourly cost against what rakeback returns: at 20% (Rainbet BOOST20) a CA$12 hour becomes a CA$9.60 hour.