There are surely many things that’ll get your ass kicked in a basement in Hanover, New Hampshire, but nothing will put it at risk so swiftly as throwing a ping-pong ball. Go ahead and piss on the wall or pitch yourself face-first into the plywood bar in the corner. But down here, in the seething subterranean pleasure centers that power Dartmouth College’s best minds into oblivion, they won’t tolerate that kind of beer pong. So you’d better hit the ball with a paddle.
Beer pong is America. The drinking game seems like it’s been on top forever, but compared to others in its world, it’s relatively young. It mirrors democracy’s everyman appeal, it rewards innovation, and it encourages self-aggrandizement — just like these United States. Plus, it does all that while floating on a Mississippi River’s worth of light beer. This generation will conclude that beer pong is a consistent thread in the always-deteriorating social fabric of “Young Folks Today”.
We just can’t quite agree how to shoot that ball, or what to call it.
The Internet is littered with beer pong “histories”, “commandments”, and “guides” that breathlessly proclaim themselves as “definitive” and “official”. Yet none satisfyingly trace beer pong’s complete silhouette. To know the contours of the modern game, I tried to do just that. I spoke to alumni from the four corners of the US, combed the archives of the country’s oldest student newspaper, and interviewed several pong prophets who claim to see the game’s future. What follows is a snapshot (a good one, I think, but given the game’s constant evolution, not a definitive one) of the state of US beer pong today.
Be sure to let me know what I missed in the comments. I hope to update this story as time goes on.
Terms & conditions
The etymology of this game (these games) is a hotly contested point. Some call it “beer pong” or “pong”, and others insist it’s “Beirut”. For clarity, this article will use the first term (or “the paddle game”) to mean a game played by paddling a ping-pong ball into some number of beer cups; and the latter (or “the throw game”) to signify a game played bythrowing the ball into those cups. In cases where direct quotations contradict this naming convention, I’ll provide additional clarification. This isn’t an endorsement of “right/wrong” names — it’s just how we’re going to keep everything straight. You’ll thank me later.
Now rack ‘em up.
The birth of the beautiful game(s)
DARTMOUTH
The game: Teams aim a ball at beer cups with a handle-less ping-pong paddle
There, it’s called: “Beer pong” or “pong”
First known instance: Late ‘50s/early ‘60s
Throwing a ping-pong ball wasn’t always verboten down in the Dartmouth basements. Despite a 1976 op-ed in The Dartmouth insisting beer pong had “origins in religion” and had been around “since Creation”, non-alcoholic table tennis probably didn’t make it to the Northernmost Ivy until the Forties or Fifties. Before then, there was no paddle/throw dogma to debate.
The paddle game would make it as far South as Pennsylvania.
“The way I’ve heard it, Dartmouth frat brothers in the ‘50s and ‘60s were playing ping-pong in the basement with cups of beer resting on the table,” recounted Crispus Knight, author ofThree For Ship: A Swan Song to Dartmouth Beer Pong. Knight, class of 2003, was speaking to me on the phone from Brooklyn, where he now lives. At some point, he went on, “Someone made the discovery that you could aim for the cups and incorporate them into the games.”
Excluding a downturn in the ‘60s (drugs being the drug of choice) and a pivot in the ‘90s after the school banned unregistered kegs, the game has thrived at Big Green ever since. “All the frats play pong,” said Knight. “Kids at Dartmouth feel like they have ownership of a very special [game] like we’re guardians of the ‘original’ version.”
In his book, Knight examines all facets of the Dartmouth game. Ship (a Battleship-esque game that demands voluminous beer intake) is the titular contest, but all the school’s many pong variations (Shrub, Slam, Tree…) are based on the same time-honored tradition: palm the handle-less paddle, hit the ball into the cup, and drink its contents.
LEHIGH & BUCKNELL
The game: Teams throw a ball at beer cups across the table
There, it’s called: “Beirut” (Lehigh); “beer pong” (Bucknell)
First known instance: 1980
Like plagiarized term papers, it wasn’t long before beer pong spread to other schools. Knight thinks of its dispersion “sort of like a game of telephone.” The paddle game made it intact as far South as Pennsylvania, where Lehigh University paddled recognizable beer pong games on its frat row, The Hill. As late as February 1979, when the term first appeared in the school paper Brown & White (below), The Hill played Dartmouth’s game.
Halfway across the state, Bucknell was paddling along, too. Marc*, Bucknell ‘82, remembers playing beer pong as late as 1978. “They must have played the game in [the Phi Psi fraternity] basement for many years because it smelled like hell down there,” he speculated to me via email.
But by the Eighties, the winds of change carried whispers of a usurper to beer pong’s Pennsylvanian sovereignty. “Throw pong” — a variant that required no paddles — was on the rise.
In his 2004 essay for the now-defunct Dartmouth Independent, Anoop Rathod quotes Geoff Hill (Lehigh ‘87) on the throw game’s watershed moment. “We [had broken] all our ping-pong paddles and wanted to use the free-throw part of beer pong.” By ‘88, Hill said, the Mountain Hawks (nee Engineers) had “made [the throw game] famous.”
Rathod also spoke to Brian Poulton (Lehigh ‘85), an early evangelist of the paddle-free game. “Stubby”, as he was called in his fraternity, tells a different tale, claiming he first discovered the game in unpolished form on a visit to Bucknell four years prior.
Indeed, even today, alumni of Lehigh’s Patriot League rival are indoctrinated as keepers of the paddle-less flame. John*, Bucknell ‘11, told me via email that “Bucknell is referred to as the place where beer pong started” on campus to this day. “I’m not sure if that’s a fact,” he conceded, but the above photo — taken at Bucknell’s House Party Weekend in 1980 — suggests it might be. This would’ve been three years before Stubby encountered the offshoot game there, and yet there’s not a paddle in sight.
Policy abroad brews creativity at home
The exact date and place will remain forever uncertain, but somewhere on the decade’s high plateaus of acid-washed, synth-fueled excess, Lehigh and Bucknell gave birth to a new, paddle-free game. Like all newborns, this offspring would need a name.
College students thought America should bomb Lebanon.
Outside America’s boozy baccalaureate enclaves, these were grave days. Ronald Reagan was in the Oval Office, and, determined to outdo Jimmy Carter’s delicate foreign policy, he’d act with decisive force to protect US interests abroad. Three international flashpoints caused global ripples that washed ashore in the Lehigh Valley:
THE MIDDLE-EASTERN THREESOME THAT BIRTHED BEIRUT
- In 1983, suicide bombers killed 241 US Marinesstationed at a barracks at Beirut’s international airport. Earlier that year, another bombing at the Lebanese capital’s US Embassy killed 63 Americans.
- In 1986, at Reagan’s command, US planes began bombing Tripoli, the stronghold of Libyan warlord Muammar Gaddafi.
- Also in 1986, an Iranian sect held US hostages in Lebanon. Reagan’s administration maneuvered an arms-for-hostages swap that would eventually blow up into the Iran-Contra Affair.
Back in Pennsylvania, besotted frat bros were reading headlines and hunting for monikers to differentiate their new throwing game from beer pong. There was an “analogy between the ping-pong balls flying across the table and landing on the opponent’s side,” Duane Kosten, Lehigh ‘86, told Rathod, plus “an idea that the US should bomb Beirut” in retribution for the ‘83 attacks. Three years later, Hill recalled efforts to dub the game “Libya” in reference to the ‘86 US air siege there, but its second syllable allegedly proved too difficult to pronounce while drinking heavily.
After Bucknell & Lehigh, Beirut swept the Northeast.
When Lebanon hit the front page yet again during the Iran-Contra Affair, anti-Lebanese sentiment may’ve broken the tie. The game would be called Beirut (“Never beer pong!!” emphasized Alison*, Lehigh ‘02, via email). University legend has it that there was even an original table painted with a map of Lebanon, though it’s long since been lost to the frat basement of history.
Either way, throwing the ball was the next big thing. It was faster and beerier and, “if you played, you got bombed.”
Setting the table
Before we follow the throw game’s rise any further, let’s talk equipment. Between Beirut and beer pong, most games are played with “standard” accoutrement: a table tennis-sized surface (9’x5’), 16oz red Solo cups (a huge majority of the brand’s cup sales are crimson; the structurally identical blue version only accounts for 12%), table tennis balls (40mm diameter, 2.7g), and beer (cheap, light). Here are some notable deviations from the norm:
BALLS
In ball-less desperation, people have apparently been known to fling crimped/folded bottle caps instead. Beirut-Guide and Urban Dictionary both cite this variation, but I wasn’t able to verify with anyone who’d actually played this way.
CUPS
At Dartmouth, “they had to be 12oz and clear,” said Knight. At Lehigh, the FK-9, an obscure nine-ouncer, reigns supreme. “These cups weren’t used by any other school, meaning [we] often ‘dominate’ tables when visiting” Solo territory, relayed Alison. The World Series of Beer Pong (more on that soon!) pushes its own branded 16oz cups at all its events.
PADDLES
On Dartmouth’s grounds, handle-less Champion Sports paddles are the weapon of choice. “Stinson’s Village Store in Hanover is where we buy [them],” said Knight. “Then we snap the handles off,” usually by bracing a paddle against a table and smashing the heel of one’s hand down on it. Some players work thumb grooves into the perimeter for a better grip.
TABLES
Dartmouth’s tables are halved by a wooden partition or broomstick to approximate a net, because their game calls for “serves” rather than turns. Other than that, no sources reported specific table requirements. Pretty much everybody wanted to tell me about a “unique” paint job done by a fraternity or team at their school, but none were unique enough to bear mention.
The only thing besides a ping-pong table worth noting here, is a door. Most everyone I talked to (including myself, who I talk to A LOT) had stories of removing their freshmen dorm doors from their hinges and laying it flat for games. Being much narrower, this surface facilitates only simpler six or 10-cup racks, rather than the multiple-triangle formations demanded by variant throw games like Civil War or speed pong.
This isn’t to say tables lack innovation; it just rarely happens at a community-wide level. Out of desperation, preference, and circumstance,Beirut players have taken aim at cups resting on everything from surfboards tosandcastles. Some mutate gameplay itself withone-off tables allowing for multi-player. The list goes on.
DRINKS
“Water pong” is painfully intuitive, but surprisingly dangerous. In 2007, Dartmouth banned playing the game with H20, citing apparently real threats of overdose. Then, there’s liquor pong — again, exactly what it sounds like. Beer is the uncontested institutional standard at every school I encountered, but these alternatives are played… and often to severe effect.
After “several rounds of liquor pong — or maybe it was Hunch Punch,” recalls Liz, UGA ‘05, it became clear that the hooch was hitting harder than beer. “All I [know is that now] there’s a picture of me from that same night, on stage, with 2 Live Crew.”
Beirut goes national
Here, we temporarily leave beer pong — with its paddles, racks, and considerable nuance — and carry on with the throw game only. Dartmouth alumni, your game is too damn complex for me to give it the respect it deserves in this story, but don’t worry: a future article will sing its praises. As for the legacy of the massively popular throw game — its day is now.
By 2006, the first World Series of Beer Pong had launched in Nevada.
Back in the ‘80s, Beirut was growing explosively, especially on Northeastern campuses.Some say it hit nearby Moravian College after Bucknell and Lehigh. Others claim Fairfield University, halfway between New Hampshire and Pennsylvania, was next.
With the slightest dash of Ivy League superiority, Knight hypothesizes ‘Rut’s ubiquity outstrips beer pong’s provincialism because it’s “the more adaptable, simpler version” of the two. It’s plausible: contained mostly on one campus, the Dartmouth game is a devil’s threeway of strictly enforced regulations, specific equipment (see above), and esoteric racks, while Beirut requires little more than a flat surface, able limbs, and a child’s comprehension of geometry.
State by state, Beirut conquered the hinterlands.
Its exact progress is murky, but by the end of the 20th century, Beirut would be the country’s de facto college drinking game. And, as it’d turn out, quite a business opportunity, too.
THE WORLD SERIES OF BEER PONG
Don’t tell Billy Gaines that Beirut is a (college) kid’s pastime. In 2003, Gaines graduated from Carnegie Mellon with an engineering degree, and he set about finding a way to combine entrepreneurship, his competitive streak (he swam for the Tartans), and his love for the ball-throwing, beer-drinking game he encountered for the first time at his alma mater.He wanted to help it grow.
There’s no “right” way to play Beirut.
“My Indiana buddies didn’t see beer pong” — for our purposes, readers, that’s Beirut — “until around 2003,” the Indianan told me in a recent phone interview. The game was still cornered in the Northeast. But “something connected me with beer pong,” Gaines said. He thought it could be bigger. So he and some partners founded BPONG.com to serve as an online community for the drinking game.
Gaines told me that the site’s original goal “was to create a platform that didn’t try to define the game, but respected… and gave people a common place to discuss it. We had a problem though. Beer pong is a very real-world game.” To bring the BPONG.com community into the real world, they launched the first annual World Series of Beer Pong in Mesquite, Nevada, in early 2006.
Myriad popular drinking games have sprung from Beirut’s well.
People laughed. “When we announced the $10,000 grand prize, it was so distant from anything else people had done that no one believed it would happen.”Beirut was the Big Game on Campus, sure, but would adults pay money to throw balls at cups of light beer in a convention center 80 arid miles Northeast of the Las Vegas strip?
Of course, the answer was yes. 83 teams registered for WSOBP 1. About 280 registered for the same event next year. At its peak in 2009, that number exceeded 500.
Lawyers, bums, wives, college kids — everybody wanted to see if their ‘Rut games could go the distance.
Gaines estimates that his company has handed out “over half a million dollars” in prize money to date, as well as sold $100,000 in branded tables, cups, and other merchandise.
In an article published December 2010, Forbes cited the website’s annual revenue at $3mill.
This once-shunned derivative of the Dartmouth paddle game was now the driving force behind its own micro-industry— and it was picking up speed.
“I’ve seen the growth of the [throw] game in a way most people haven’t, because [in the early years] I shipped all our orders,” says Gaines.
After it broke out of the Northeast, the throw game hit Florida. Then, orders came in from California and Arizona. Gaines guesses he’s shipped to all 50 states by now, and many other countries. Each electronic transaction on BPONG.com was a signal flare: Beirut had conquered another hinterland.
BPONG.com is not the only organization that “ripped the [throw] game out of frat basements and brought it to the mainstream stage,” as Gaines describes it. There were plenty of other pseudo-official leagues that helped its rise. And of course, most of Beirut’s growth had nothing to do with the organization’s patronage — people do legitimately love to play it, after all. But BPONG.com (and its WSOBP) stands out as the familiar through-line that gives Beirut its age-old, semi-legitimate vibe.
The “rules” of Beirut
Speaking of legitimacy: there’s a good chance you’ve been in a screaming match about “house rules” with someone named Chaz. I have too; it’s the worst. The truth is, there’s no “right” way to play Beirut. But when you look at the data — and yes, there is data — you’ll find some pretty solid establishing principles.
BY THE NUMBERS
Sadly, the Pew Research Center has yet to turn its considerable resources on the world of Beirut. Luckily, there are two stat sheets — one famous, one not — that offer insight into its myriad rules & regulations.
In December 2006, CollegeHumor published a simple seven-question poll about Beirut. It received approximately 34,500 responses. Lost in the shuffle of a redesign, the map itself is gone and the polling tools dead end, but using the Wayback Machine, I was able to pull some results. Beirut-Guide’s House Rules Generator — which is still operational and has garnered approximately 44,000 submissions to date — furnished another data set. Between the two, we can get a sense (inexact and statistically dubious as it may be) for some of the commonalities that exist nationally.
IN THE FIELD
In practice, Beirut becomes an infinite thicket of provincial regulations & parameters.Instead of trying/failing to index them all, I’ve included the most common rules I turned up in my research. Note: These are but a few of the myriad laws that govern the throw game. I don’t endorse them as “official”, but acknowledge them as practiced.
Re-racks
Out of bravado, tradition, or both, some schools prohibit reracks entirely, even for games with more than 10 cups. “[Bucknell is] the creator of the game — why would [we] need a rack?” explains John. Elsewhere, rules focus on how many rearrangements you can call for, but rarely what kind of arrangement. Some common racks, above.
“Call your shot and make it — that’s two cups.”
Naked laps & trolling
There are two predominant penalties for getting “skunked” (failing to sink a single cup). These losers must either nude-run a predetermined, maximally humiliating distance — Zetas at Lehigh looped nearby sorority Alpha Phi, reports Alison — or to sit beneath the table and drink all that remaining beer. Sometimes, these “trolls” have to sign the undersideof the surface, a permanent reminder of their failure.
Distracting the shooter
Obstruction is a thriving component of the modern game. Students, especially crafty women, often resort to verbal and physical tomfoolery to disrupt a thrower’s game. Mike, Lehigh ‘02, has braved those elements. He wrote in an email, “[I] had two girls putting their tongues in my ears, and another pulling my pants down on the last cup… but I still hit to win.”
NBA Jam
Named for Midway’s beloved video game franchise — in which a player’s third consecutive make would ignite the ball and elicit a Marv Albert-ish exclamation — this bonus rewards hot-handed ‘Rut shooters. “‘Heating up’ is two in a row,” Matt, University of Florida ‘03, told me in an email. Then, there’s “‘on fire’, wherein after you hit three in a row, you shoot until you miss.”
Island/sniper & satellites
When a cup gets isolated from the rack (making it an “island” on the table), some bylaws allow for a bonus. “Call your shot and make it — that’s two cups” at UGA, said Liz.
The island’s cousin is the satellite. At Lehigh, Alison says, this randomly placed, fully filled bonus cup “was basically incentive/excuse to get the other team to drink more. If you hit one of your opponent’s satellites, someone on that team had to chug the entire thing.”
Bounce-backs & full contact
In the Mid-Atlantic states, you’ll often hear tell of “Georgetown rule”, though I spoke to Hoyas from ‘07 & ‘10, and neither laid claim to it. Nevertheless, it follows: if an unsunk ball skitters back towards the shooter, it’s live. Should that shooter lay hands on it, he/she is rewarded with an extra turn, taken behind-the-back. (Knock your own cups over in the process, though, and it’ll cost you in most games, including Cornell’s.)
Because the ball usually bounces off the table, this bonus usually runs hand-in-glove with a “full contact” stipulation — devastating for the uninitiated. “When I was rushing, a kid… picked me up and pile-drove me into the wall. It was kind of funny,” recalls Alex*, UVA ‘10. In Virginia’s three-on-three “speed pong varietal” (full disclosure: I was also a 2010 Cavalier; more on that in a minute), there were times when “all six players would be wrestling for balls and no one [would] even be shooting.”
Death cup
This rule is simple: at any point during the game, if a shooter lands a ball in a cup that’s in the process of being drank by an opponent, the game is over. Pinning down its application… sketchier. “We definitely played death cup,” wrote Alex, a 2010 Colorado Univerity grad. “This actually came around post-college,” said Liz, non-committally. She graduated in ‘02. “Didn’t play at UGA, that I remember.” Some purists go the other way, prohibiting the contest-ending gimmick because it short-circuits gameplay.
Then, there’s Mongoes (aka Mondo). Alison from Lehigh told me about this variation: “when you hit someone’s unprotected drink — even if they are holding it — [they] have to drink three additional cups.”
Friends and family
The flip-side of the cup? The Beirut diaspora has turned it into a decentralized tangle of interrelated simulacra, which bear less & less resemblance to the original. These are but a few popular games that’ve sprung from Beirut’s well:
Beer die
What it is: A low-slung, throw-across-a-table game beloved in pockets of the Northeast for its mellow pace. (See vintage photo from Maine’s Bowdoin College, above.)
How it’s different: The table looks similar, and the Solo cups on each of its four corners recall Dartmouth’s original paddle game. But players are seated low to the ground, and they underhand-throw dice at each other’s cups.
Beer ball
What it is: A two-on-two game based on flinging (then chasing down) balls that ricochet off cans.
How it’s different: Allegedly invented when would-be Beirut players realized they forgot to purchase cups, this game eschews them. As such, there’s nothing to “sink” — instead, the ball is lasered at full cans at either end of a standard table. Teams track down the rebounds.
Alcohockey
What it is: Air hockey + beer pong = Canada’s greatest invention since plus-sized bacon.
How it’s different: Swapping the pong table out for a modified pneumatic one, this loose derivative hinges on players dropping the puck into cups submerged below the level of play.
Speed pong/Civil War
What it is: This rough-and-tumble older brother features a larger table, three-on-three teams protecting three racks each, and nonstop gameplay.
How it’s different: Beyond the triad-triangle cup configuration, its biggest deviation is that it has no turns — as soon as you get the ball, you shoot the ball. (Just drink your cup first.)
On drinking games and navel-gazing
Drinking and history generally hate each other. But when it comes to beer pong and Beirut, it’s different. Generations of lager-logged students have probed the void, seeking the games’ origins, its secrets, and its legacies. From the very beginning, pong and ‘Rut have been the trick mirror in which their players seek meaning for four years, or forever.
I ask him to tell me the best part of Dartmouth’s game.
In 1972, a Dartmouth student named Ted Lippman wrote a letter to the editor of The New York Times, inquiring about who held beer pong’s world record, so that he and his classmates could break it. “We would like to try for the record in early June of this year,” he politely concluded his note, “so a quick response would be appreciated.” This, to the editors of the most important newspaper in the free world. But in Hanover, beer pong has always been important business.
The Dartmouth (the school’s student paper) would cover beer pong with a myriad of columns, exposés, and reports over the years, but its short-lived rival, The Dartmouth Independent, would actually wind up publishing pong journalism’s urtext, Rathod’s aforementioned “Without a Paddle”. Later, Lehigh’s Brown & White, The Daily Princetonian, The Cornell Sun, and countless other university publications would rush to quantify the throwing game and its popularity. By the mid-aughts, curious examinations on the games (mostly the more popular Beirut) were commonplace in “real” periodicals— The New York Times, TIME, and The Atlantic, among others.
Beirut has turned into an interrelated tangle of simulacra.
And the websites! Lord almighty, the websites. One look at the homepage of the now-shuttered National Beer Pong League is all you need to envision how ‘Rut’s quest for self-awareness coincided with the Dot Com Age. There were custom Beirut buddy icons, guys. Diehards wanted — needed! — to understand why they loved this game so much, and they looked to the storytelling power of the Internet for answers.
For that matter, this article is just another example of beer pong’s navel-gazing habit. I didn’t write a piece on the origins & present states of Kings Cup, or Moose, or Thumper, even though each may have fascinating sagas. No, I pitched beer pong because it seemed more permanent, as though it’d always be here because it’s always been here. Even though it hasn’t.
Where will it go from here?
When I spoke to Billy Gaines, he was in Vegas, preparing to announce another tournament and optimistically navigating the choppy waters of a TV deal. “I used to travel, and a 60-year-old would ask what I’d do,” he responds when I inquire his opinion on the throw game’s future. “They’d be puzzled when I told them. Now, they say ‘Oh yeah! I’ve played that with my grandchildren.’ It’s not just frat kids anymore… it’s about people having fun & doing something together.”
My last interview for this story was with Mitchell*, an 18-year-old student-athlete finishing his freshman year at Dartmouth. Despite being a Hanover resident, he first encountered beer pong when he matriculated, and like Crispus Knight, Anoop Rathod, and every other Big Green frosh before him, he spent the year getting acquainted with the paddled game. He intends to join a Greek organization, and so will most of the school. In the New Hampshire foothills, the game is still firmly owned by frat kids. But like their forebearers, these Dartmouth men and women seem to respect the flame they keep.
I ask Mitchell to tell me the best part of Dartmouth’s game, the one that’s still played in those foul-smelling basements, recognizable despite a half-century of drinking game evolution around it. “I’m a very competitive person, so sometimes I’ll play to win,” he starts. “But my favorite thing is when I realize that no one else is playing to win, and people are just hanging out and having fun.”
Paddles or tosses, clear cups or red, death cup or not — people across the country don’t agree on much when it comes to beer pong and Beirut. But they know why they play.
*All names followed by asterisks were changed out of respect for that source’s desire for privacy.
Dave Infante is a senior writer for Thrillist food & drink and honed his craft playing Beirut at Middlebury College and speed pong at the University of Virginia. Tweet at him (@dinfontay) with updates, suggestions, and comments about this story.
