If You Liked Playing Beer Pong In College, You'll Love The Drinking Game Beirut

For those gladiators of the glug out there, there is a drinking game called Beirut whose rules will probably sound familiar to people who have played modern-day beer pong. That's because they're essentially the same thing. While the origins of Beirut aren't exactly clear, it is believed that it may have started at either Bucknell University or Lehigh University in the early 1980s. Depending on what source you consult, Beirut can consist of 6 or 10 cups arranged in a pyramid on each side of a table with two opponents on each side.

Similar to the beer pong of today, Beirut involves teams taking turns throwing ping pong balls into plastic 16-ounce cups of beer until one squad runs out of cups. If one is sunk, then a person on the other team has to drink that beer. When a team sinks two cups in a row, their opponents must drink them both and the team that tossed the balls gets to throw again. If each person on a team makes a ball in the same cup, the game is over. 

The main difference between the two is that the original beer pong or "pong," reportedly founded in the 1950s at Dartmouth, entailed using a paddle to aim ping pong balls at cups. You could require your opponent to drink by either hitting the cup or making it into the cup. In Beirut, the balls are thrown, and there is no reward for merely contacting a cup. 

So why have most people heard of beer pong but not Beirut? It has been hypothesized that the latter moniker could relate to a tragic historical event that occurred around the time the game received its name. In 1983, suicide bombers killed 241 American marines at a military barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, during the Lebanese Civil War. The speculation is that the college kids who first played the drinking game (whether at Lehigh or Bucknell) used the name to indicate that the ping pong balls being thrown into cups symbolized bombs being dropped on Beirut buildings in what was then deemed by some students as warranted retaliation for the attacks. 

As the game was adopted throughout other areas of the country, the geopolitical connection was eventually lost and it became known instead by beer pong. This is largely because in colleges outside the Northeast, people weren't aware of the paddle version called beer pong that already existed and so they adopted what seemed to them an apt name. 

Redditors debated the name usage in a 2010 subreddit, with some contending that using paddles is beer pong while throwing means it is Beirut. Another Redditor noted that the evolution of the game to throwing ping pong balls into cups necessitated a more suitable name change from Beirut to beer pong. Today, the game of Beirut has become relegated to more of a historical footnote, and beer pong is now the accepted nomenclature whether playing with or without a paddle.