A ball falls through a field of pins and lands in a slot with a multiplier. That is the whole game. Everything else — rows, risk levels, strategies — rearranges the same arithmetic without changing it.
Plinko takes its shape from a television prize game and its maths from a much older idea: drop something through a grid of obstacles and it will settle near the middle far more often than at the edges. The distribution that produces is called binomial, and it is the reason the outer slots pay hundreds of times the stake while the centre pays a fraction of it.
Understanding that one fact tells you more about Plinko than any strategy guide. The multipliers are not generous at the edges because the game is feeling generous; they are large because landing there is rare, and the two cancel out almost exactly.
Three settings, and none of them is skill:
The path of the ball. In every online implementation the outcome is decided before the animation starts; the bouncing you watch is a rendering of a result already fixed. Most operators publish a seed pair so you can verify this yourself after the round — see provably fair.
Published RTP for Plinko sits between 97% and 99%, which is high for a casino game. It still means the game keeps one to three units in every hundred staked, forever, and no setting changes that. What the settings change is how violently your balance moves on the way to that average.