1) In the summer of 2005 Anheuser-Busch created Bud Pong, a marketing ploy to capitalize on beer pong’s popularity. It came under controversy though because the official rules of Bud Pong was that only water should be consumed during the game because they didn’t want to support underage or binge drinking. Obviously that didn’t happen because beer pong without beer is just throwing a ball into a cup. They even sponsored events at bars but Anheuser-Busch ending up shutting the whole thing down.

2) Beer pong has evolved quite a bit since its birth. Such games include Flip Pong which is exactly like it sounds, a hybrid of flip cup and beer cup. Fear pong, a game that combines beer pong with dares. Either do the dare or drink the cup. The most innovative one is Battleship or Battle Shots. Remember that board game as a kid? “You sunk my battleship.” Basically it’s exactly that but a oversized version with a lot of drinking involved.

3) You can go pro in beer pong. For over ten years every summer in Las Vegas there’s a international tournament with $50,000 going to the winning team. There’s a lot of competition though, over 1,000 people participate each year.

4) Beer pong gets it name from a modified version of ping pong where there are two beer cups on the table. The players try to make the ball into their opponents cup. It was invented in the 60’s by fraternities at Dartmouth College during a ping pong tournament.

5) The scientists of Rockefeller University had a very important question to answer. Can playing beer pong get you sick? They set up a game themselves and did swab tests on the ball, cups and tables before and after the game. Most of the microbes they found couldn’t hurt you but a few were questionable. To avoid this, when I was in college we put water in the cups and drank our beers on the side. However, this is very controversial. Some people embrace it as a good idea to be sanitary while others reject it completely claiming it changes the nature of the game.

6) Speaking of catching something, in 2009 there was allegedly an epidemic of college students giving each other herpes (what else is new?). Many news stations including FOX said that beer pong was the root cause. Turns out that this was just a hoax started by a satire website. The CDC even came out and debunked it. Regardless, don’t share cups because that’s the most likely way to catch something.

7) In the 1980’s Lehigh University’s Theta Delta Chi fraternity renamed the game to Beirut after the capital city of Lebanon. The reason being there was a civil war going on over there at the time and the college students thought the balls hitting the cup racks kind of resembled bombs being dropped over a city.