Beer pong , also known as Beirut , is a drinking game in which players throw a ping pong ball across a table with the intent of landing the ball in a cup of beer on the other end. The game typically consists of opposing teams of two or more players per side with 6 or 10 cups set up in a triangle formation on each side.
If the team "makes" a cup - that is, the ball lands in it, and stays in it - the contents of the cup are consumed by the other team and the cup is removed from the table. The first team to eliminate all of the opponent's cups is the winner. Beer pong is played at parties, bars, and at colleges and universities, [ 3 ] [ 4 ] along with other venues such as tailgating at sporting events.
The game was originally believed to have evolved from the original beer pong played with paddles [ 10 ] which is generally regarded to have had its origins within the fraternities of Dartmouth College in the U. The original version resembled an actual ping pong game with a net and one or more cups of beer on each side of the table.
Bucknell University 's student-run newspaper, The Bucknellian , claims Delta Upsilon fraternity members at Bucknell created "Throw Pong", a game very similar to beer pong, during the s, [ 9 ] [ 15 ] and that "Throw Pong" was then brought to Lehigh University by fraternity brothers who visited Bucknell and this led to the creation of the version of beer pong that is played today.
The origin of the name "Beirut" is disputed. A op-ed article in The Daily Princetonian , the student newspaper at Princeton University , suggested that the name was possibly coined at Bucknell or Lehigh University around the time of the Lebanese Civil War.
