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Page 1 of 2  We all have played it at one time or another, but why do some people discern it as beer pong while others call it Beirut? Is it possible that some people are better educated than others or is it just that people just don’t give a damn. “Beer Pong,” as east coasters call it, “is the act of hitting a ping-pong ball into a cup with a ping-pong paddle.”
For those of you who have left your dorm room and saw the film Beer Fest, will notice that during the film players play beer pong, using paddles to hit ping-pong balls into cups or steins with the point of chugging their contents.
“Beer Pong is not a sippers game, it’s a chuggers game” said one ivy-league school graduate who wished to not be named. At the northeastern school she attended they played a game they called Pong. To the outside world beyond the boundaries of the college, they call “‘Pong’, Beer Pong. Beirut is something entirely different.”
Between any school, house or residence everyone has different rules, but at every school there is always some general rules that everyone seems to follow. At this ivy-league college they played a game of Pong called “shrub”, where you have two players on each side of the table and use two paddles. Each side sets up 6 cups in a triangle formation, a paddles width from the edge of the table. Players then play the standard game of ping-pong with the purpose of hitting the ball into the opposing teams cup, to make them drink.
This ivy-league school is also a wet campus. They have an on campus bar where bouncers check students ID’s and students are allowed to walk around with open containers. Fraternities rarely on probation and basements are full of kegs and ‘pong’ tables.
The east coast seems to have gotten things right. If you go to a school and want to play beer pong then paddles will come out. However if you want to play Beirut its time to step up your game and put your balls into it, much like Pacific students do here.
However, on the west coast students call Beirut, beer pong and as Michael Wright put it “I don’t know the difference between Beirut and beer pong.”
Mike said at his house they play Beirut with six cups on each side of the table and a center cup between the two racks of six (for a total of 13 cups per side). Two players on each time then shoot the ball into their opposing team cups in an effort to make them drink all their cups.
As with the east coast, rules for Beirut on the west coast differ from house to house. Some places play with 13, others play with 10 cups on each side of the table. Rules as far as bouncing, “fingering and blowing”, and swatting are entirely different.
Where does the name Beirut came from you may ask yourself. As per the Beirut Players group on Facebook, “The name ‘Beirut’ is said to derive from an irreverent, and some would deem offensive allusion to the Civil War in Lebanon in the 1980’s in which mortar shells were lobbed at Beirut, the country’s capital city.”
Beirut or beer pong, however you prefer to say depending on your props, is as a very sociable game. Both sides usually end up ‘talking shit’ to their opponent to hopefully make them miss their shot. Much like people who scream during a basketball game when a player prepares their free-throw shot.
So what does this all mean? Are under-educated students calling Beirut, Beer Pong? Or do they just don’t really know where things come from and attempt to follow the norm? So does that make everyone a follower? Yes, it must be. “It is two different games, we play with paddles where as you shoot the ball like a basketball, it’s more of ‘loss of translation’” said Abbey Golden, representin’ Cleveland, Ohio.
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