Play Beer Pong in Las Vegas
Published May 21, 2009 by Martin Bean
Beer Pong is a game that is relatively unknown in the UK and we really are missing out. Now, Las Vegas is not the only place to play this wonderful drinking game, but it is definitely the best place to play it.
The charming O’Sheas is a relatively small casino (well, by Vegas standards anyway) but a fantastic and fun place. It’s a casino that has live entertainment with live bands, karaoke music and even a night entitled ‘Psychic Universe’ if that’s you’re thing—although don’t expect it to tell you the winning numbers on the roulette table!
But more importantly, O’Sheas is the Las Vegas home of Beer Pong. Like all drinking games Beer Pong is simple, but its an extremely fun (and surprisingly competitive) game. O’Sheas has a whole section dedicated to Beer Pong and has lots of ‘Championship Length’ Beer Pong tables.
Handily, O’Sheas is in a fantastic location on the Las Vegas Strip—opposite the legendary Caesars Palace, so you could start with some Beer Pong and move on to the excellent Caesar’s nightclub, PURE (see our review of PURE here), to show off your Beer Pong inspired victory dances.
So, how does the game work I hear you ask? Well, you need two teams of two people (or you can play solo if you really want to drink some beer!). Then you buy two large pitchers of beer, one for each team. Along with the pitcher, each team receives 10 cups each and two ping pong balls.
Each team is stationed at opposite ends of a Beer Pong table and then places their cups at their end of the table in a close knit, snooker ball type formation (see photo below). Then, you distribute the pitcher of beer evenly amongst your teams 10 cups.
With the cups filled with beer and players thirsty, the action is almost ready to get underway. A coin toss is then required to decide who will go first.
Now, the fun begins!
Each team alternates throws. So if there are two players on each team, both players must throw once before the opposing team takes their turn.
The aim is to land your ping pong balls directly into the beer filled cups of your opponents! If you land your ping pong ball in the cup of your opponent then they must drink that cup of beer in one go—yep… down it! The cup is then removed from your opponents table and you are 1-0 up.
Then (assuming your in a team of two) it’s your teammates turn to throw his ping-pong ball. What happens next depends on how accurate their throw is:
You Score… They get drinking! As both players on the team have scored, you get to take another go each before letting your opponents play! Fantastic. Regular scoring keeps your opponents guzzling beer and means that their aim will soon be wavering!
You Miss! It’s Their Turn – Hand the ping pong balls over to your opponent and it’s their turn to try and get you drinking some beer.
As we have mentioned missing a shot for the first time, it is vital to point out a Beer Pong custom—clean your ping pong balls when you miss!!!! Before the game, the wonderful hosts at O’Sheas will give you a spare cup filled with water to clean your ping pong balls after they’ve hit the dirty floor. I mean, we wouldn’t want to ruin any precious beer with dirt would we!
It’s all about getting those balls in the beer filled cups as regularly as possible. The longer the game goes on, the more drunk you (or your opponents) get, then the smaller in size the beer cups seem!
So that is the basics on the game. You each take turns and the team that ends up having to drink all of their beer first is declared the loser!
Then it really gets tricky… in true Beer Pong tradition, the winner stays on the table to play a new challenger (who must provide and fund the next two pitchers of beer!) in the next match up.
There are a few small quirks you also need to know:
Re-racks—To keep the game (and beer) flowing, the cups are rearranged into a snooker bally type filled formation, once a teams is left with only six cups and then rearranged again when this reduces to three cups. No moving of the cups at any other stage is permitted! This presents an easier target for your opponents, so don’t fall behind early or you might not catch up!
Blow the Balls—If a ball hits the edge of the cup and is spinning around the cup before dropping in the beer, you can still try to get the ping pong ball out. No, not with your hands; that’s cheating! But you can blow the ball out! This takes some talent (and practice) but it does work and has made a crucial difference in many tightly contested Beer Pong matches.
I have experience of winning 4 successive Beer Pong matches in O’Sheas (including a win over our American hosts who introduced us to the game) and let me tell you, by the end of the 4th game my aim was dreadful!
We’d won each of the previous games by a single beer, so had drunk an awful lot. Then comes our completely sober next challenger and predictably, we got absolutely destroyed, losing by 4 or 5 cups of beer. But we did have a whole lot of fun!
If you want to see Beer Pong in action, in the very O’Sheas casino we’re talking about, check out these two videos we found on YouTube.
More to follow on Beer Pong in the future, including the finer details of the rules! But get practicing ahead of your trips to Las Vegas!
Played Beer Pong already? Share you stories with Boxing Capital and we’ll publish them all. Email info@boxingcapital.com.
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