The Aztecs had mental ball game, games that show physical dedication and fight for collective victory remain central to our conception of sport. In the 3,000 years since, we’ve streamlined these basic concepts in fifa 23 and beer pong. But I’m not complaining. I think it’s time for our definition of serious gaming to change.
While we celebrate professional sports with billions of dollars and stadiums, and reward hardcore gamers with billions of dollars and Comic Con, simpler pleasures like beer pong is not recognized in the “game of no tacit agreement”. really a game”. But our laid-back weekend bacchanal also deserves credit—the two great Allagash Whites deliver optimal performance, after all. In pursuit of this, I spoke to two beer pong champions, Pro Beer Sports CEO Eric Kutche and is based in the UK Twitch streamer Bex Donaldon how to master beer pong, a fraternal house ritual that most people have done at least once in a cloud of fun, mess.
What is beer pong?
We should establish the basic rules of the game before going into the details, although there is a lot of variation depending on the game. What country are you in and how creatively your friends want to get drunk. Here is the key point:
- There are two teams of two
- Each team places 10 quarter-full cups, ideally red Solo, in a pyramid shape at opposite ends of the table.
- You alternate with your opponent, having two turns to throw a ping pong ball into their cup and discard it. Your opponent must share their eliminated cups.
- If your team lands both of your shots, the ping-pong balls will “roll back” and you have two more chances to sink your ball into the opponent’s cup.
- When all of a team’s cups are exhausted, the game is over
But your road to greatness has only just begun, young man.
1. Choose your cup and focus on it
Kutche’s love affair with beer pong begins like any other fairy tale—in college. “I’ve always been one of the best players wherever I played,” he said. “I practiced all the time because my group of friends played a lot and I wanted to win.”
In the end, Kutche and his friends searched for a larger arena. “My friends and I always wish we could participate in competitive beer pong tournaments, but there aren’t many like them,” he said. They founded Pro Beer Sports, which now hosts Beerlympics and weekly beer pong tournaments in an effort to turn the perhaps underrated game into something more serious, just as eSports did for the game. play game.
“I call our version of the drinking game ‘bSports’ because we play the game at the highest level,” he said. “We’re bringing beer pong to ESPN.”
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Enter the fighter’s mind with Kutche’s first tip. “Always shoot at a specific cup,” he said. “If you want to be a true master of beer pong, practice hitting the last cup. If you can hit the last cup within three shots, you win most of your beer pong games.”
2. Watch your arms
There are three common styles of beer pong: a graceful arc, a quick, powerful pitch, or a single, nonchalant throw off the table. Kutche is part of style and grace.
He said: “The best pictures are those that arc through the air. “If you could trace the trajectory of the ball after it was hit, it would be more like a rainbow than a straight line.”
“When shooting, keep your arm parallel to the table so that your arm forms a 90-degree angle with your body to help you achieve that desired angle,” says Kutche.
Like Kutche, Bex Donald found beer pong in college. Playing well “came quite naturally,” she says, “I competed in shooting in high school so I think the skills have transferred a bit, and as a game player, I think my goal has helped in real life.”
She ended up running a nightclub’s pong table as a part-time gig and winning “drinks worth several hundred pounds over the years”.
For her, pitching beer is a personal pursuit. “Find a balance in your stance and position that you are comfortable with and that will help you hit the mark,” she says.
3. Have the right attitude
“The most important rule of beer pong is to have fun!” Kutche said. Playing any game for the first time can be intimidating, especially in a group drinking game where teen movies can forever label you as just kids. stylish kids.
But you shouldn’t “take the game too seriously,” says Kutche. “Everybody wins at the game of beer pong. I’ve seen so many people become friends, even couples, after meeting at the beer pong table.”
Donald repeated the statement. “Don’t get pressured by your opponent or your team, take your time and focus,” she said. “Even the pros miss a few shots, but practice makes perfect.”
Donald also introduced me to an important metric, which she calls PPIP: Highest Performance Drunk Score.
“This is enough drink to give you confidence but not enough to distract from bar games,” she says. “Mine is two and a half to three pints.”
4. Consider water instead of beer
“Many people think of fraternity parties and binge drinking when they think of beer pong, but Pro Beer Sports is changing that perspective by treating beer pong and other drinking games as one thing,” says Kutche. sport. “We played with water in a cup because I lived through the age of drinking beer in a cup and looking back, it was disgusting.”
I also play with water. But if you’re willing to take the whole, you should take it anyway. Donald advises players to learn how to drink beer thoroughly so that “it doesn’t distract you from the game going on.”
“Some beer pong establishments will have slightly warm, flat, and coarse beer. Unfortunately, that’s a danger of the sport,” she said. “I have a little trick of holding up my pinkie while drinking and staring at it, almost like looking at the horizon to avoid travel sickness. That helps me.”
After absorbing all of these tips, I, a very good beer pong player, decided to test it out… by playing iMessage, Pigeon’s version of the Game Pigeon. the game is called ping pong. I know it’s not a perfect alternative, but it was my cleanest, best pick at 12 noon on Monday. Sober, unless you count the rest of the vodka rigatoni sauce I still take.
Red cups, rainbow arcs, and a game of peer pressure ping pong popped into my head. At first, I was nervous because I knew I was a female athlete with an extremely inconsistent iPhone usage.
Choose a cup. Shoot in an arc, I reminded myself. Amazingly, I won this game for the first time, so I can confirm that these tips work with both real and virtual cups. Next time I will play with Mark Zuckerberg in Farmville 6D simulation.
But when you find yourself at the beer pong IRL table, remember these tips and try to enjoy it as a moment of easy relaxation. The low stakes games we’ve consistently created throughout history—like beer pong, like iMessage volleyball—are not really about winning, they’re just about loving playing.
