Beer pong isn’t just a game played with friends at parties anymore. There are state and regional competitions, and the World Series is held in Las Vegas, Nev. The official association is BPong, which has a website at bpong.com Paul Dausman, 29, Warsaw, started participating in the competitions a couple years ago, traveling as far as Las Vegas, and wants to bring tournaments to the area. “I had played in my college years just like everyone else. I think that was probably my first time, playing at West Lafayette at a friend’s party. But it wasn’t something that I was really ever into,” he said during an interview Wednesday night. In late 2012, after running slow-pitch softball teams competitively for three years and getting burnt out on that, he thought it would be a good break to try something different. “I am a really competitive person so I wanted to try and find something that I could remain competitive at and not have to rely on other people, while at the same time – being competitive – I wanted to be really good at it as quick as possible,” Dausman explained. He eliminated sports with steeper learning curves like bowling. He kept looking around for about two weeks for something to feed his competitive spirit. “Eventually, I came upon beer pong,” he said. “I saw that the World Series was in Vegas and I thought that would be a real fun place for me and my friends to go and participate in.” Dausman and a few friends started practicing beer pong in January 2013 on their own. They looked for tournaments that were close, finding some regional World Series qualifier events they could take part in. “It really worked out that I had decided early on that I wanted a sport where I didn’t have to rely on people because my friends bailed out pretty quick,” Dausman said. “We were even practicing here at the house for a couple of weeks ... but they didn’t even make it to the first tournament.” His first tournament was the Indiana state game in summer 2013. He realized “pretty quick” that the competition was a bit stiffer than he thought. “People from all over came to it – guys from Ohio, Michigan, Illinois, even St. Louis,” Dausman recalled. He didn’t do well and could count on one hand the number of games he won. “But I was sucked into the community, really, the whole scene. Everybody is really great to get along with. It’s really easy to bond with everyone and I made a lot of great friendships from that first tournament,” he said. About a month later, Dausman took part in a big qualifier tournament in Bay City, Mich., with a lot of Michigan teams competing. “I went up there by myself because there was a random partner event. I went up there, got paired up with somebody, which happened to be one of the top players in Michigan. We ended up doing really well. I think we ended up getting third or fifth. It didn’t give me any bids to the World Series, but that’s no problem because you can always buy your bid in,” he said. After that, he continued traveling up to Michigan for competitions in 2013. Competitive beer pong is not that big in Indiana yet, he said, especially compared to states like Michigan. Indiana has six or seven active players, he estimated, including himself. At World Series X this year – which was held New Year’s Day – there were five players from Indiana including Dausman. He was the only Indiana player with an out-of-state partner. “There were 293 teams at the World Series this year, and we placed 97th, which was good for us. The previous year, my partner and I placed 160th, so we didn’t make the final day of competition,” Dausman recalled. Placing 97th this year advanced Dausman and his partner to the third day of the competition. The first two days were preliminary rounds, and Dausman and his partner were 8-4 going into day three. That seeded them into a double elimination bracket. Jan. 1, 2014, was Dausman’s first experience at World Series. “It’s huge. It’s such an electric environment. There’s DJs and basically pong is being played around the clock,” he said. “That environment just affects you differently than the regional events. I was super nervous that first year, and didn’t shoot as well as I could have. So this past (World Series), I was a lot more prepared for that and much more comfortable in day one and day two. Going into day three – the nerves really took over and I didn’t have the same shot I had on day one and two and we went 0-2 in the double elimination bracket.” They got beat by a team they had defeated earlier in the tournament. “It’s funny because this game is seriously 90 percent mental and controlling your nervous energy. It’s exciting because the energy on the other side of the table – you get a range of people,” he said. There’s rules about not being able to cross the plane, but no rules about what you can say or do. In competitive beer pong, the rules are slightly different. The cups in the game no longer actually have beer in them. “It’s still beer pong. Not played with beer in the cups anymore for sanitary (reasons), and it gets around a lot of the legal issues that a lot of the smaller local promotions have trouble with. Honestly, it’s been huge from a sanitary standpoint,” Dausman said. However, he said, the biggest difference is leaning. “It’s allowed. There’s no elbows, the leaning is allowed and the reason behind it is because it’s impossible to enforce without having a referee at every table,” Dausman stated. “At the World Series, when you’re playing with 90 tables at once, there’s logistically no way for them to have 90 referees. They’ve got two pits and have about three referees per pit to help monitor.” He wants to start up a beer pong scene here locally. Southern Indiana has a few bars that host tournaments, and there are competitions in Michigan that he wants to replicate here. The tournaments could be held at places like bars or bowling alleys one night a week, he said. “There’s results that show we can make slow nights busy,” he remarked. If someone wants to host a beer pong competition or tournament, Dausman said they can email him at pdausman@gmail.com He can supply the balls, cups, tables and racks. “I can hash out the details with them,” he said.
