slam pong refers to the action of slamming a table tennis ball with a paddle into a plastic cup of beer placed on the table, the fundamental way of scoring points in the game. In Slam pong teams have only two players and players have only one beer cup on the table each. For a volley to be legal both players on a team are required to strike the ball with their paddles before the ball can strike the table or beer cups. One of the earliest documented records of slam pong comes from Chris Robinson, Dartmouth College class of 1986, who recalled playing slam pong when he was an undergraduate. An article in the March, 1986 issue of Playboy magazine describes slam pong being played by the brothers of Psi Upsilon at Dartmouth. By the early 1990s, slam pong was played in nearly half of all Dartmouth College Greek organizations, and had been introduced 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. By the early 2000s, slam pong had been almost totally eclipsed by other variations of beer pong, especially Beirut, one of the first variations of beer pong to be widely played across the country. At Dartmouth, lob became the standard variation of beer pong played by undergraduates. Scoring Essentially players are trying to get their ping pong ball into the cups of the opposing team. There are two primary variations for scoring and declaring the winner of a game. In the five-point game, hits count for one point, sinks count for two points, and knockovers count for five points. 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.