Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Beer Pong: A Drinking Game

Some might say that alcohol is fun enough by itself. They might enjoy losing some inhibitions, socially interacting with friends, or just winding down after a hard week. Set aside from other drinking games is beer pong. Beer pong gives you the perfect medium to do all these things, while testing your skills.

Only the last ten years or so, beer pong has become a standard at parties. You can see people of all ages playing beer pong now and why not? This game is fun, tests your skills; and is coupled with a little healthy competition. Playing this fast paced and challenging game; it’s pretty tough to get bored.

Whether it is two people or two teams of two; it takes two to beer pong. If you get a tournament going, the amount of teams are endless. Beer pong is also a pretty fast pace drinking game. This makes it easy to switch out or rotate teams. So you can have ten people over wanting to play and beer pong will easily entertain the whole party. Beer pong is a fun spectators sport; so, watching is just as fun.

The setup is fairly simple. Just make sure to grab a table that is between six and eight feet long and a minimum of two feet wide. Set up ten 16 oz. cups on either side of the table in a pyramid form with the points of the pyramids facing opposite from each other and collinear. The bottom of the pyramids should be no more than eight feet apart. Fill the cups with about a third of beer and put one cup on each side of the table full of water for your ball rinse (no need to waste beer). Typically a 40mm. ping pong ball is used. Although, I have seen other items used in desperation (walnuts, marbles, Barbie heads, acorns); so, make sure you have enough balls.

The basic rules are pretty straight forward. You can either flip a coin or make some kind of trick shot to see who goes first. Basically, the point of the game is to try to throw the ball in the other person’s cup and alternate turns if you are playing on teams. If you make the ball into one of the opposing team’s cups, they must drink the contents of that cup. Be careful with bouncing the ball in to the cup because the other team can swat it away. If they do swat the ball from going in their cup, the throwing team must drink one of their own cups. If the ball is thrown and it’s spiraling around the rim of the cup you can also blow or flick it out but you can’t spill any beer or else your team will have to drink. If you are successful then the opposing team drinks. For every drink you take you need to remove the cup from play. Also you need to call a re-rack to re align the cups. You can request this at six, four, and two (cups remaining) during play. We also have the redemption rule. This is where the drinking game gets interesting. Usually, when you have to make the redemption shot it’s a trick shot and usually house rules determines the shot. If you make the shot on a redemption call, you win the game.

The rules of beer pong can get a hard at times but there is no need to get into all those rules. After all, it’s only a drinking game. It is interesting to see different people’s rules for beer pong but all you need is the basics to start playing. Once you have learned those, then you can get creative with your own rules. By all means, have fun and your new imaginative rule can spread virally and be used all over the world.

A drinking game for the ages, beer pong, is played all over the world by all types of people. This was just a sneak peek; so, join in the fun. Just remember to be safe and responsible. Have people check in their car keys. If you are hosting a party, make sure there is room for people to crash.

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