Tuesday 21st July 2009 – Beerpong

I suddenly noticed the local bar has a shuffleboard table.  There is a crack team of grown-up ladies only two thousand miles up this great river, faces blacked, airboats revving, just waiting for the hint of a challenge.

But there is another table in this bar, a table beyond the ladies.  There is a boys' game in this bar.  It involves, and this will surprise you, drinking beer.

I have never seen anything quite like this before.  They call it 'Beerpong'.  It is, technically, a variant of 'quarters', to which I was introduced on graduation night in Newport, RI, not so long ago.

Essentially, the table allows the setting-up, in a triangular pattern, of (I think) about ten beers: at each end.  The players have to bounce a quarter into a beer in the other player's set.  If the quarter goes into a beer, the defending (ha, ha) player has to drink that beer.  Quarter-cleaning is an umpirorial duty, although the game is often played among friends who have no need of an umpire, or, indeed, quarter-cleaning.  Quarters, it would appear, are regularly consumed. 

The more regular Beerpong game uses pingpong balls, but that is not nearly as violent as this local variant.  Tables here wear out quite quickly, and the pits formed by the more popular pitches give the table the appearance of a well-worn cricket pitch.  The better players can take advantage of these pits, like Shane Warne  in the fourth innings.

There is an unexpected bonus: the looser has to drink the surviving beers of the winner.  So losing heavily can turn into a cheap night out