Beer Pong slightly more than a drinking game

Across college campuses all over America, students celebrate the end of each week with partying, which is naturally accompanied by booze.

From fraternity boys to your typical overachieving classmate sitting in front of you in English 101, everyone is either unhinging their bathroom door or setting up pingpong tables in preparation for the madness that is beer pong.

Beer pong, also known as Beirut, is a traditional college game that mixes drinking in excess and ping-pong. In a beer pong game, there are two teams that consist of two people. In front of each team are ten cups, half-full of beer, arranged in a triangle.

The object of the game is to make the pingpong ball into your opponents’ cups of beer. Every time that a player makes a shot, the other team has to drink all of the beer in that cup. The game varies as there are different rules from beer pong table to beer pong table, but the idea of the game is still the same.

What was once a cheap and effective way to drink a lot of beer in a short amount of time has turned into some sort of a strange quasi-sport.

“Beer pong is moving away from what people view it as, a drinking game, and turning into a real competitive sport,” said Ben “Skinny” Folnik, World Series of Beer Pong co-founder. “It’s not about the drinking anymore. It’s about skill and it’s about hitting cups.”

Although it is named beer pong, only water is used in the national tournaments to promote the sporting aspect of the game, Folnik said.

Since 2006, BPONG.com, the self-proclaimed center of the beer pong universe, has sponsored nation-wide tournaments aimed at crowning a beer pong national champion.

“I got involved for the first world series which took place Jan. 2006 in Mesquite, Nev.,” Folnik said. “The first one was kind of just an experiment to see if a very large tournament could work. It brought out 166 players from across the country.”

After the first champion was crowned at the WSOBP in 2006, the national tournament became insanely popular, tripling the number of participants by the second World Series, Folnik said.

“We moved it into Las Vegas for World Series III,” Folnik said. “Now we are up to World Series V, this January. We’re doing a $50,000 grand prize and over $65,000 in total prizes. We expect over 5,300 participants.”

Anyone can enter the WSOBP for a price, $550 per person which includes a four-night stay at the Flamingo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas during the tournament.

An alternate route to the WSOBP is by winning one of the 150 satellite tournaments that take place across the country, Folnik said.

“A satellite tournament is basically a local tournament, either a 64-team double-elimination tournament or something similar,” Folnik said. “The winning team gets a free entrance to the World Series.”

The BPONG satellite tour stopped in Denver on Oct. 8, and saw 54 teams compete for a spot in the WSOBP. Team HP Puppet Masters, comprised of Nick and Bear Martinez, won the tournament that took place at Table Steaks East in Denver to give them a free trip to the WSOBP. This is not the first year that they will be participating in the WSOBP, as HP Puppet Masters placed fifth in last year’s World Series.

The WSOBP will be held Jan. 1-5, at the Flamingo Hotel and Casino and will feature four days of beer pong with teams from the United States and Canada.

BPONG TOUR STOPS

Oct. 22: Columbia, Mo.

Nov. 13: Raleigh, N.C.

Dec. 3: Miami, Fla.

Jan. 1-5, 2010: World Series of Beer Pong in Las Vegas

Josiah Kaan is a reporter for The Metropolitan, the student-produced newspaper at Metropolitan State College of Denver.

Share