I find that interesting. Is the road version the same height as the studio prop? If it's shorter, I imagine it would be easier as there are fewer pegs for the chip to take a couple bad bounces away from center.
Plinko follows a normal distribution when chips are dropped. A shorter board would give the contestant an extra advantage because a normal distribution may not be possible, and I doubt the live show is willing to give away more money than what’s intended based on how the game was designed. If anything, the board looks skinnier based on a random Google search, but that could be camera angle.
I think what helps the live show is that it’s played more often. The CBS version has 80-something games to rotate through, so Plinko may not get played except once every week or two. Live show seems to have less games, but played more often. If the CBS version played Plinko everyday, we may have seen a full win by now, but that would be boring seeing the same game everyday.
Getting 5 chips is also necessary for a full win; anything less makes it impossible. Barker-era seemed to go easier on the pricing game portion because maybe they understood the odds were already low for a full win. Carey-era, at least when he started, seemed to make the pricing portion very difficult, which threw any perfect-win scenario out the window.
The other thing is that, because it follows a normal distribution, placing chips in the center guarantees you the highest odds of winning the full amount but also the highest chance to walk away with $0. A contestant may not wish to lose Plinko on national television and may opt instead to place their chips at the edges. That increases their odds of winning something but decreases their odds of winning it outright. You can easily see a contestant doing that if they place their first few chips in the center and hit 0’s. Odds are, they’re going for a corner next to at least try and walk away with something.
