The Best Game

There are a lot of things that run through my mind, it’s never quiet. Many of those things are heavy, but sometimes my brain gets stuck on something a little lighter, a little more fun. And that’s why, after weeks of thinking about it (and seeing that Costco is selling a life-size version of it) I sat down at my computer to finally get it out of my system. 

Plinko is the best game on The Price is Right. Plinko doesn’t take any skill. It’s a luck based game, well, once you get beyond the initial pricing game, which honestly I didn’t remember from all the episodes I watched as a kid. I was only reminded of the pricing part when I read an article the article “How The Game Of ‘Plinko’ Perfectly Illustrates Chaos Theory” published in Forbes in 2020. An excellent article that mentions Newtonian physics, quantum mechanics and probabilities, only a fraction of which I understood but enjoyed nonetheless. And while the science behind the game is super interesting that’s not why I love it. 

Once you have your pucks (hopefully all five) you climb those little stairs, take a deep breath, lean over the edge, slap the puck against the game board, and just… let it go. That’s it, your part is over, you can’t control the bounce, you can’t control where the puck ends up. It’s up to the Universe, the random route the pucks take through the spikes, it’s out of your control, there’s no need to worry about what you could’ve done differently because even if you’d placed the puck in a different spot there can’t be any guarantees. If you lose you can tell yourself it wasn’t your fault, luck just wasn’t on your side. If you win then you jump up and down and probably shriek because you just won some money to take a cruise or pay off your student loans or put a down payment on a new car. 

There is a larger metaphor for life, at least the way I’m trying to live it, in this post, perhaps one day I’ll find the motivation to explore it further, but for now I have to head out, my friend is picking me up soon to take me to Costco.