What is beer pong and how do you play (drink) it?
As with any activity involving alcohol, beer pong may cause players to become drunken or even intoxicated enough to suffer alcohol poisoning.
BEER pong is a drinking game in which players attempt to throw or hit table-tennis balls into cups of beer, and their opponents are required to drink the contents of any cup in which a ball lands.
“The bar was fairly empty but we had a great time playing beer pong” is a quote which can be heard from time to time.
According to Wikipedia, the game is described thus:
Beer pong, also known as Beirut, is a drinking game in which players throw a ping pong ball across a table with the intent of landing the ball in a cup of beer on the other end.
The game typically consists of opposing teams of two or more players per side with 6 or 10 cups set up in a triangle formation on each side.
Each team then takes turns attempting to shoot ping pong balls into the opponent’s cups.
If a ball lands in a cup (known as a ‘make’), the contents of that cup are consumed by the other team and the cup is removed from the table.
The first team to eliminate all of the opponent’s cups is the winner.
The game was originally believed to have evolved from the original beer pong played with paddles which is generally regarded to have had its origins within the fraternities of Dartmouth College in the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s, where it has since become part of the social culture of the campus.
The original version resembled an actual ping pong game with a net and one or more cups of beer on each side of the table.
Eventually, a version without paddles was created and the names Beer Pong and Beirut were adopted in some areas of the United States sometime in the 1980s.
Bucknell University’s student-run newspaper, The Bucknellian, claims Delta Upsilon fraternity members at Bucknell created “Throw Pong”, a game very similar to beer pong, during the 1970s.
‘Throw Pong’ was then brought to Lehigh University by fraternity brothers who visited Bucknell and this led to the creation of the version of beer pong that is played today.
In some places, Beer Pong refers to the version of the game with paddles, and Beirut to the version without.
However, according to a CollegeHumor survey, beer pong is the more common term than Beirut for the paddle-less game.
The origin of the name “Beirut” is disputed.
A 2004 op-ed article in the Daily Princetonian, the student newspaper at Princeton University, suggested that the name was possibly coined at Bucknell or Lehigh University around the time of the Lebanese Civil War.
Beirut, the capital of Lebanon, was the scene of much fighting during the war, particularly mortar fire.
Traditionally, the game of beer pong has been played by countless variations of rule sets. In recent years, organisations such as The World Series of Beer Pong have put forth “official” rules.
Typically, players abide by a uniform set of “house rules” which are often consistent within one university or region of the country (e.g. “West Coast rules”) or may vary on a “house-by-house” basis.
Number of cups, bouncing, re-racking, amount of alcohol, distance shots must be taken from, etc. may all vary.
All house rules should be posted or verbally stated and understood by both teams before the game starts.
The order of play varies – both players on one team can shoot, followed by both players on the other team, or players on opposite teams can alternate back and forth.
A cup that is made must immediately have its contents drunk and be removed from play.
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Some rule sets allow for “re-racking” (also known as “reforming”, “rearranging”, “consolidation”, and other names), which is a rearrangement of a team’s remaining cups after some have been removed.
The formations, number of cups, when to rearrange and so on, depend on the rule set. For example, a team with three remaining cups may ask the other team to “re-rack” the cups into a single triangle formation.
Common house rules allow players to ‘finger’ or blow the ball out of the cup if the ball spins around the inner rim.
Another common house rule states that if a team makes both shots during their turn, a ‘rollback’ occurs allowing each player to shoot again.
In the World Series of Beer Pong rules, only a single-ball ‘rollback’ occurs resulting in a three cup maximum that can be made per turn.
Before shooting, teams may dunk the ping pong balls into cups of water in order to wash off the balls.
However, research has shown that the wash cups can still hold bacteria such as E.coli.
To avoid any illness, many players put water in the cups instead of beer, keeping a separate beer on the side to drink from.
In doing so, it removes the possibility of getting sick or drinking any dirt that may transfer from the ball into the cup.
The game may have several associated health risks.
As with any activity involving alcohol, beer pong may cause players to become drunken or even intoxicated enough to suffer alcohol poisoning.
Also, the supposed cleaning effects of the water “dunk” cup may be offset by bacteria in the cups.
Some writers have mentioned beer pong as contributing to “out of control” college drinking.
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