Games - Slam pong

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	Games - Slam pong

Slam pong is a form of beer pong that has been popular at Cornell University, Dartmouth College, and other colleges and universities in the northeastern United States. It is most commonly found as a social activity of Greek organizations. Unlike many other variants of beer pong, slam pong is a fast-moving game that retains some of the rules of table tennis but borrows inspiration from the rules and game play of volleyball. The name slam pong is derived from beer pong, which is in turn was derived from Ping Pong, a trademarked name for a brand of table tennis merchandise. The "slam" in slam pong refers to the action of slamming a table tennis ball into a plastic cup with a paddle, the fundamental way of scoring points in the game.

History

Beer Pong with paddles can trace its origin to the mid-1950s, when fraternity houses at Dartmouth College first began to experiment with drinking games that included the placement of a newly-available plastic cup full of beer on a table tennis table during a game. An Alpha Delta fraternity alumnus, David Thielscher, class of 1954, recalled in an interview for The Dartmouth newspaper that beer pong was played when he was an undergraduate. The objective was to try to hit the ball into the cups. The sport seems to have been played in a rather informal manner through the latter half of the 1950s and the 1960s and spread to a limited number of other college campuses in the northeastern United States.

Beer pong became recognized as an intramural sport at Dartmouth College in the 1970s, with individuals and teams most often representing fraternities and sororities. Rules of the game were standardized, and competitions were held at the fraternity and sorority houses. The game was played in a manner very similar to table tennis, with one beer cup placed on the table for each player. Beer pong at Dartmouth was the only college-sponsored drinking competition in the country, until 1977 when the college decided to discontinue its sponsorship of the games. Official derecognition would not reduce the level of beer pong activity at Dartmouth or elsewhere, but would lead to many new variations on the game.

Slam pong was one of the forms of the game that evolved from the traditional beer pong of the late 1970s. Slam pong retained the use of just one beer cup per player, with two players per team, but added the twist that a legal volley required the ball to strike the paddles of both players on a team before striking the table or beer cups. One of the earliest documented record of slam pong comes from Chris Robinson, Dartmouth College class of 1986, who recalled playing slam pong when he was an undergraduate. By the early 1990s, slam pong was played in nearly half of all Dartmouth College Greek organizations, and had been introdcued to other colleges including Bowdoin College, Bucknell University, Cornell University, Lehigh University, Princeton University, and Williams College, but by the middle of the decade was beginning to decline in popularity. In the five-point game, whenever a team earns points, both players of that team are expected to drink one fifth of the total volume of their cup for each point. In the four-point variation of the game, hits count for one point, sinks count for up to two points, and knockovers count for up to two points. If a cup is half-full and gets sunk or knocked-over, that counts as only one point. Players in a four-point game are expected to drink half of a single cup for each point. A team cannot lose on a serve. If a team has only one point left, they cannot have the last point scored through their own ineptitude. However, if both teams have only a single point left, a team may "serve out" if other are waiting to play a subsequent game. In a five-point game, the first team to earn five points loses. In a four-point game, the first team to earn four points loses.

Variations

There are various styles of slam pong play. One style is characterized by fast, straight serves, and almost vertical, hard slams. At some Greek organizations, the style of play leans toward serves with more spin, or "finesse" slams that involve hitting the ball into the cups as softly as possible to display a slammer's accuracy. Some Greek organizations use slightly smaller tables or slightly higher nets, both of which tend to de-emphasize the role of a skilled server, as they make fast, hard serves more difficult. Because of the general difficulty of completing a successful volley in slam pong, games can last for much longer than other forms of beer pong, with matches of 20 to 30 minutes duration being common.

Slam pong in American culture

As one of the variations of beer pong, and a drinking game, slam pong has been the subject of academic research. Concerns over binge drinking on college campus have increased focus on games like beer pong and slam pong. Dartmouth College Anthropology Professor Hoyt Alverson published research work on the beer pong culture at Dartmouth in the early 2000s. Although slam pong had largely been replaced at Dartmouth and elsewhere by other forms of the beer pong game, Alverson noted that the variations played from 1999 through 2002 involved complex social processes. "Beer pong and similar drinking games are not played solely to achieve inebriation, Alverson finds, but instead serve as a competitive outlet for high-achieving students, and a structured atmosphere for peer interaction." Critics of beer pong contend that, regardless of their social nature, the games encourage binge drinking, and should be discouraged.

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