Beer pong (also known as Dartmouth pong or Backgammon or Paddle) is a drinking game loosely based on ping pong that involves the use of paddles to hit a ping pong ball into cups on the opposing side. The origin of beer pong is generally credited to Dartmouth College. History It has been attributed to a Dartmouth College fraternity party. An Alpha Phi 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. History professor Jere Daniell '55 stated that he played the game as a student, and Bob Shirley '57 stated that he began playing in 1956. Shirley suggests that the game began when spectators rested their cups of beer on a table during a ping-pong game. One of the earliest published photographs depicting a game of pong appeared in Dartmouth's 1968 yearbook Aegis (page 304). By 1976, students began publishing articles about the game. In the early 1970s, Dartmouth College briefly sanctioned the game as an intramural sport, making it the only college-sponsored drinking contest in the country. In 1977, Dartmouth ended this practice. This official derecognition did not reduce beer pong activity at Dartmouth or elsewhere, but would lead to many new variations on the game. By the mid-1980s Pong was well established at several universities, including Bowdoin College, Lehigh University, Lafayette College, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Whitman College, and Williams College. According to a 1999 article in The New York Times, pong "has been part of fraternity life for at least 40 years, as hallowed as rush or Winter Carnival". Other Ivy League newspapers have called Dartmouth "the spiritual home of beer pong", and characterized pong as "a way for Dartmouth frat boys to get drunk [that] has become what is arguably America's favorite drinking game". Statistics A 2004 survey of Dartmouth students provided these statistics: About 60 percent of students had played pong at least once within the two weeks prior to the survey. About 20 percent of students have never played pong. Tree requires the average team to consume 7.3 drinks, Shrub 5.7 drinks, Line/Death 5.2 drinks, and Ship 7.4 drinks. Variants Slam pong In the late 1970s Slam pong evolved. Slam pong is a fast-moving variant of beer pong that retains some of the rules of table tennis and includes others from volleyball. The "slam" in