The national Beer Pong League

By: Jeff Barnes

Like most people, I first started playing beer pong to have fun. It was a win-win for me. It appealed to my competitive nature and it was a great way to pass the time while drinking. I never expected to take the game seriously as a sport, nor did I expect to still be playing it into my late twenties. The idea of playing in organized tournaments or flying to Las Vegas for the World Series of Beer Pong did not exist in my mind.

For most players, once they get a taste of the competition they are immediately hooked. We all started out playing at house parties and scribbling our names on paper towels and empty 30-pack boxes to call next game. Then we go to our first tournament and see brackets and trophies and spreadsheets and it brings a whole new legitimacy to it. I’ll never forget my first beer pong tournament and how excited I was to play in the next one, and the next one, and so on.

Unfortunately, though, for many of us, at some point the line between having fun and taking it seriously as a competition gets blurred. We start placing too much emphasis on winning and when we don’t win, we find that we aren’t really having fun, either. It's almost an addiction. Once you experience some success -- the high -- it just makes you want more, and when you don’t have it, you don’t feel as satisfied. Kind of like crack. Not that I’ve ever done that or anything. Seriously though, I've never smoked crack.

After a while, the disappointments start adding up, especially in the major tournaments. The human spirit can only take so much losing. All but two people leave the beer pong tables of Las Vegas and Atlantic City as winners, the rest of us are losers. We wonder why we keep putting ourselves through the misery of playing well only to come up short. On those long drives and flights home we start reflecting on our lives. We start thinking about our jobs, our relationships, our families and everything else.

If you’ve been playing a while, chances are you’ve contemplated your beer pong retirement at some point. It’s natural, and in some cases it’s warranted. I retired around this time last year only to come back a few weeks later. For a terrible player such as myself, I probably shouldn’t have come back. But for others, retirement is a mistake.

One of those players making a mistake is Vincent Bolhuis, one of the best players in the world. The Michigan native announced his retirement on a Facebook post this week:

Today I am officially announcing my RETIREMENT from "pro beer pong"

I am playing in 2 more big tournys
1. Drunkenbear 10k w/ Vince Catizone
2. Atlantic City 25k w/ Kevin Kessler

I would love to win one of these last 2 b4 I am done. If not it has been a great run.

I won my 1st tournament I ever played in 1k, over 30 satellites in the next 2 years, 3 mid-majors with Michael Popielarski, Jason Chichester, and one in 09' for 2.5k in FL, 2nd place in the WSOBP 5, and was named 2nd best player in the world by AABP League at one point.

Good luck to everyone the rest of the way and thanks for the memories!!! I will never forget it!!!!

I think Vince is making a few mistakes here. For one, while he stands a good chance of winning in Atlantic City with Kevin Kessler, he stands no chance of winning with his Drunken Bear partner, Vince Catizone, who is just not a very good player. He’s also not playing in WSOBP VII, which saddens me.

Speaking of Kessler, it’s also no secret he’s planning on hanging up his designer shoes after the upcoming WSOBP. But he’s got an attractive wife and kid, so I can understand if that’s how he wants to conduct business.

While Vince and Kessler may be some of the biggest names to publicly announce their retirements, they won’t be the first to walk away from the sport and they won’t be the last. The first generation of competitive beer pong players are getting older, and it’s only a matter of time before we wish them goodbye. One of these days, we are going to be without the Pops, the Kesslers and the Vinces of the world. Who is going to step up and take their place? It’s now time for a new generation of competitive beer pong players to make their mark.

It’s easy to get tied up in all the winning and losing, but I think it’s important to step back every once and a while and realize why you started playing beer pong in the first place. Although we all want to win, for most of us we started out playing with friends and just having a good time. Every player is not going to win 30+ satellite tournaments like Vince has. Most players aren’t going to win money like Kessler does. You’ll remember the times you had off the table more often than the games you play. Just have fun.



And Vince? He’ll come back. They always do.

By: Jeff Barnes

It’s January 1991 and the entire Upstate New York area is on the edge of its seats. The Buffalo Bills are trailing the New York Giants by one point in Super Bowl XXV with only seconds remaining. The hopes of the entire region depend on the leg of Scott Norwood, the Buffalo Bills placekicker. The ball is kicked and sails wide right of the goalpost. Buffalo loses the game, as well as the next three Super Bowls. The franchise would never recover.

Almost twenty years later, the Upstate New York area is again on the edge of its seats. But this time, it’s the duo of Chris Baker and Mike Hulse and it’s the championship game of the World Series of Beer Pong III in Las Vegas. After Chris Baker sinks the last cup for the Iron Wizard Coalition, it’s up to Chauffeuring the Fat Kid to hit an improbable four-cup rebuttal to force overtime. They do. Moments later, after missing their own rebuttal opportunity, Chris Baker and Mike Hulse find themselves at the losing end of the greatest comeback in World Series of Beer Pong history. The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat, indeed.

About two-and-a-half years ago, after dominating the beer pong table daily in his Mu Omicron Zeta fraternity house, Montreal native Christopher Gravel came across Iron Wizard Coalition’s crushing defeat during a YouTube search. It was his first exposure to competitive beer pong, and a video which would ultimately change his life.

The now-24-year-old financial services representative wanted to get in on the action. He organized a 16-team tournament, a rarity at the time in Canada. His path crossed with Paul “Captain Canada” Kurylowicz, and the two founded the Montreal Beer Pong league. In less than three years, the league’s Facebook page has grown to over 400 members. It hosted Montreal’s first-ever World Series of Beer Pong satellite tournament a few weeks ago, attracting 63 teams.

“At first it wasn’t really competitive,” Gravel said. “There’s a lot more competition now. It’s evolving.”

It was in those events that Gravel forged a relationship with the “stars” of the YouTube video, the Iron Wizard Coalition. The tournaments also gave Gravel and Kurylowicz the confidence to enter their first World Series of Beer Pong tournament last year. The two played fairly well, but amidst his blackouts, excessive drinking and wild antics, “Captain Canada” advised Gravel to find a new partner to compete with.

“He’s not that bad,” Gravel said of Kurylowicz, who has become more well-known for his performances off the table, rather than on it. “He enjoys the attention,” he said.

Without a partner for the then upcoming World Series of Beer Pong VI, Gravel had some options, but no definite partner. The seed for Gravel’s eventual partnership with Maryland’s Deryck “The Dream” Weaver was planted last summer in Atlantic City, New Jersey. The two instantly hit it off, and Deryck offered Gravel his personalized Maryland Beer Pong shirt. The shirt, emblazoned with Deryck’s nickname, proved to be more than just a friendly gift.

“I played absolutely amazing in it,” Gravel said. “Now, in all my major tournaments, I always wear his shirt.”

After deciding at the last minute to play together, Gravel and Weaver found themselves at the Flamingo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, preparing for the first day of competition. Despite flying relatively under the radar, “Unstoppable Since Inception” felt good about their chances before preliminary competition began.

“Looking at our schedule, I saw 11-1, 12-0. We really didn’t have a tough schedule,” Gravel said. After coming out and playing well in their first game despite not playing together in major competition before, Gravel felt even better about their chances. “I could tell that we were up there,” he said. “I was expecting us to do very well.”

For some, “doing very well” means a winning record. For others, it means making the final day of competition. For Gravel and Weaver, it meant going undefeated and entering the final day as one of the top seeds of the tournament. And a whole lot more.

As Gravel put it, “it was kind of a perfect storm” for “Unstoppable Since Inception” on the final day. They avoided one of the tournament favorites, “Allergic to Losing” when they were eliminated. The team breezed through the final day, and a rare off performance by “Peter and the Giant Peach” along with their own solid shooting propelled Gravel and Weaver into the finals and their chance at $50,000.

“We were consistent going through,” Gravel said. “It just kind of happened so fast. Then it’s, ‘Wow, I can’t believe we’re in the finals.’”

Despite opening the first finals game with a blistering 7 for 8 shooting performance, it was not meant to be for Gravel and Weaver. The Midwest team of “Standing Ovation,” featuring Dan Range and Nick Syrigos, would claim the title of World Series of Beer Pong Champion.

Although they placed second overall, members of the beer pong community have not been as quick to praise Gravel and Weaver as they have previous runner-ups. Many believed the final four match between “Standing Ovation” and “Last Of A Dying Breed” was the “real championship” between the tournament’s two-best teams, a fact which doesn’t seem to bother Gravel.

“Those two teams are good,” Gravel said. They played epic games.”

While the sport of beer pong continues to grow in Canada, Gravel wants to see it grow even more. Gravel has noticed more interest locally following his performance in Vegas, and hopes that it will bring out more and more teams.

“It really seems to excite people,” he said of his second-place finish. “It does make them think they have a shot of doing well in this.”

For the sport to grow even more as a whole, Gravel believes a universal set of rules and television exposure are a necessity. Like other top players, Gravel agrees that if the sport is to be taken more seriously, players need to act more seriously.

“We’re not all there to get shit-faced, at least the serious guys aren’t,” he said.

“I feel for them man. I would give my second-place
to have them win first-place anytime.”

by Jeff Barnes

One day, the World Series of Beer Pong will be televised. If you've ever headed out to Las Vegas to compete, you've dreamed of the day you'd be watching yourself sink cups on ESPN for the whole world to see. If we truly want to see the sport of beer pong legitimized, it's the next logical step, and one day it will happen. I'm sure of it.

I haven't always been so sure, though. I've long wondered what kind of market was out there for the event. Would people watch it? Would they be entertained? Would they attach themselves to the players and root for or against them? Would it help attract new players to the event? These are all questions that will be answered the day when our beloved sport finally hits the silver screen.

Until that day, however, if we want to watch beer pong we're pretty much limited to searching "beer pong" on YouTube and seeing what kind of results come back. Luckily, in the age where almost everyone owns a smartphone and technology increases at a rapid pace, we now have thousands of beer pong videos at our disposal on the internet. And I'm not sure if you've noticed, but the quality of these videos has increased exponentially in the last year or two. If you haven't checked out BPONG's official videos of this past World Series of Beer Pong VI final, you'll be blown away by how great it turned out. Click here for Game 1 and here for Game 2. High quality video, shooting percentages, and multiple close-ups of the dreamy Dan Range. What more could you ask for?

This production is in stark contrast to video footage of the first World Series of Beer Pong final, which was posted in January of 2006. Since its posting, the video has been viewed more than 690,000 times, which eliminates any questions whether an event like this would be able to attract enough interest from viewers.

While that video certainly illustrates how far beer pong videos have come, one only has to read the first page of comments to see the kind of negative commentary our videos invoke. There seems to be a lot of questions about the rules, the players, and some suggestions to improve the game overall. With more than 1,100 comments, I could only respond to some.

As you'll see, our version of beer pong has somewhat of an image problem. If everyone does their part, maybe one day we'll realize our dream of seeing the World Series of Beer Pong on ESPN.

zx6r8104: world series? my ass
Me: Posted more than four years ago, this is perhaps the first ever negative comment posted about the World Series of Beer Pong rules. User zx6r8104 is a pioneer.

pjt147: little lean dont ya think?
Me: This is a very good observation, the players are indeed leaning a little bit. User pjt147 has the distinct honor of posting the first ever YouTube comment mentioning the players leaning in WSOBP rules. Almost every comment which follows mentions leaning in some way, as well as the simple equation leaning=pussies.

coogiszk: are they playing on a popsicle stikk?? what kinda amateur shit is this?!
Me: No, believe it or not they are not playing on a popsicle stick. These players are playing on an official World Series of Beer Pong table. Sorry for the confusion, the two do look quite similar, don't they?

hubbard689: french people suck
Me: Hard to argue with that.

notahookah: I agree with PureDdser.. even if the table is longer than usual, that is honestly still not legit.. play normally and keep the arm length with the ball lined up @ the edge of the table.. I would take a shit on the person's chin who ever hosted this beer pong tourny.
Me: Billy, Duncan and Skinny just made a new friend. Make sure to wash your face.

drinkingeducation: Who plays beer pong with less than 5000 cups anyway? my game was way bigger and way more epic. search largest game of beer pong or just check out my video...haha.
Me: Seriously! There's no worse feeling than showing up to a party or beer pong tournament and finding the table is short about 4,980 cups. Hate when that happens.

ar374: lame. you are obviously stupid and go to a county college because pong is never about competition; its about playing with a girl and showing how "athletic" you are. fools.
Me: I'm currently reconsidering my decision to attend a state university as opposed to a county college. I was not aware that pong was purely to show the ladies how athletic I am. Pong is never about competition. Definitely not.

traumatized85: we allow leaning when we play, but we use a 8'x4' peice of plywood as a table..
Me: Finally, someone supports leaning! However, only if the table is 8 feet of plywood, as opposed to an 8 foot WSOBP table. Otherwise, leaning is for pussies.

stewy0327: I guess if they are play tournements in Vages like that then maybe, just maybe you need to learn how to play. This video is the same way I play, just a thought
Me: He said "vages" lol.

RickySmith357: why dont they juss fuck at the end? Lol
Me: Now THAT's a video I'd like to see.

chiefweezo: i dont know if im blind but it looks like they r playin 6 cups, what pussies. not to mention they r leaning half way across the table.
Me: Yep, you're blind. There's actually only 3 cups on the table. Also, good call on the leaning.

PimpPoptart: lol you guys are all worried about elbows...? im worried that its france FUCK france
Me: The only thing worse than someone leaning is a French person leaning.

stinkytoy: i find it hard to believe that in the WORLD championship, they could even miss ONCE! doesn't everyone know someone that makes like every shot? Hahaha
Me: I know, right! I mean, they are leaning so far! It is so easy! They are practically slam dunking the ball! How can you miss??

rham2826: u wanna get in the running to win a WSOBP entry or 650 bucks?? Check out my site wwwdotsmashingpongtimedotwebsd­otcom and take my all sports challenge and nba ,ncaa bb challenge
Me: Ron Hamilton, is that you?

Dudefish4203: I just dont get it.. Im just to smart for this beer pong thing
Me: Yeah, you are probably to smart.

Bossasaurus5101: What's up with the flagrant elbows and hand fouls. It's pretty easy if you're allowed to shoot so close to the cup. BS
Me: Agreed. There were numerous hand fouls this game that the referees did not call.

JustinMcK117: I am alot better than both teams. I have made 9 cups in a row... And I dont hang my elbow over even when were aloud to. This is a joke. I will this win next year.
Me: He did not win that year. Or this year.

3HEFZR91: look at that elbow cross, get the fuck back.!
Me: Another stellar observation.

kdubs336: these dudes definitely had sex after this.
Me: Hopefully… what happens in Mesquite stays in Mesquite, though.

Murderface80: wow thats gay as hell, the french would be the people to not obey the table touch rule lol
Me: Damn French.

xdutchx1990x: ELBOWS U WEAK FUCKERS! play me i dare you, ill put 10 grand on one game. pro up pussies
Me: If xdutch1990x was born in 1990, that makes him eligible to play in this year's tournament. Any takers?

lilhomie0163: World Series of Dropping-Balls-In-A-Cup Championship Game Las Vegas 2006. Better title?
Me: Has a nice little ring to it.

By: Jeff Barnes

A Google search was all it took.

They say beggars can’t be choosers. When a beer pong player wants to play, he’ll use anything he can get his hands on. Red cups, blue cups, mismatched ping pong balls, it doesn’t matter. So when Brandon Marx was invited to play beer pong at a house party using “professional beer pong balls,” his curiosity was piqued and he had to check it out.

It was that Google search that first led Brandon Marx to the BPONG website. He searched for upcoming tournaments and found himself at the website for Fast Times Entertainment, the gold standard for Arizona beer pong. And thus began his meteoric rise from dominating house parties to beating some of the world’s best players on the sport’s biggest stage.

Climbing The Ranks

There’s a big difference between playing for beers at someone’s house and taking shots for thousands of dollars against some of the sport’s best players. Marx knew he was pretty good, but wasn’t sure how he’d stack up against the best. After a solid showing at his first large-scale tournament at last April’s Breakers $5,000 tournament, he wanted more.

"I’ve always felt I can compete in anything if I put my mind to it,” Marx says. “I got hooked even more then. Everyone was telling me how good I was then, but I still wasn’t sure."

When Marx and partner Chris Gracia followed Sweet Tea’s performance up with wins over Vince Bolhuis and Jason Chichester en route to a second-place overall finish a few months later at All American Beer Pong’s 5K tournament in Vegas, Marx finally believed.

“I knew I was on my way then,” he says.

In the relatively young history of competitive beer pong, there have been countless stories like Marx’s: Beer pong player discovers competition, beer pong player plays well in a big tournament and gains recognition, beer pong player is hyped as the next World Series of Beer Pong champion, beer pong player receives overtures from other top players to team up, and the typical story ends with beer pong player ditching longtime partner and falling short with top player at next major tournament.

But Brandon Marx is not your typical beer pong player. Sure, on the table he fits the bill. He’s a madman, an entertainer. He’s one of the few top players both skillful enough to hit all the shots and crafty enough to cause an opponent to miss. He’s the player that moons his own mother to distract his opponent. On the table, he knows no boundaries.

"Everyone looks for that ‘it’ thing they do that they like and they’re good at,” Marx says. “Beer pong’s my ‘it’ thing."

Off the table, however, he’s different. He may moon his own mother, but he’s also one of the few beer pong player’s nice enough to invite his mother to Las Vegas in the first place. In a sport dominated by villains and players who will do almost anything in order to win, Marx is old-fashioned, if such a thing exists in the beer pong world. And he’s loyal, a relatively unheard concept in today’s beer pong community.

Chemistry

In the world of pharmaceuticals, chemistry is the foundation. Chemistry is a science that deals with the composition, structure, and properties of substances and with the transformations that they undergo. It’s fitting that Marx, 25, happens to manage one of the busiest Walgreens pharmacies in Arizona. His career depends on chemistry. So it’s no surprise that on the beer pong table, Marx values chemistry just as much.

Instead of becoming just another top player to leave his partner for someone better, Marx did things differently. When he started receiving offers to play in The World Series of Beer Pong VI after his Vegas performance, Marx assured Gracia that he wasn’t going anywhere. The payoff? A top five finish in the biggest beer pong tournament in the world.

"I told him if I got any offers, I was going to stick with him,” Marx says. “Chemistry—that’s what I bought into."

“Nobody recognizes Arizona beer pong, that’s our problem,” he says.

It’s his desire to help Arizona beer pong grow that helped Marx choose—already—his partner for the upcoming World Series of Beer Pong VII. He’ll be playing with fellow ‘Zona player Zack Luckey.

“I want to keep it Arizona.”

When he’s not helping put Arizona on the map, Marx is also doing his part to help the sport grow as a whole. He does his best to offer his advice for new players seeking his help, and voluntarily skips tournaments to make it a little bit easier for new teams to win. He’s become a staple of the online beer pong community.

For something that began with a simple Google search, Marx is now all in. And he’s not the only one in his family. His mother, who became one of the few parents to ever watch their children compete at this past WSOBP, now also suffers from the beer pong itch.

“That was her first time seeing it in person,” he says. “Now she wants to buy a table. She wants to play in the coed tournament with me. She loved it. She thought it was pretty amazing.”

With partners already lined up for the next four major beer pong tournaments, Marx wants the beer pong world to know what they will be up against.

“Bmarx has arrived. I’m not giving up. I’m going to win.”

You can Google him.

By: Jeff Barnes

Yesterday was Thursday and tomorrow is Saturday, which means today is Friday and it's time for another edition of the "Friday Rebuttal." Fun, fun, fun, fun.

I've been writing about the sport of beer pong for more than two years now, and I've noticed this is always the most difficult time of year to write about. The majority of us are still kind of burned out from The World Series of Beer Pong^®, there haven't been many tournaments scheduled, and unless you live in California, there's not a whole lot of motivation to leave the house between the months of January and April.

Slowly but surely, however, things are picking up. I can tell things are picking up because I'm becoming more and more annoyed every time I log into my Facebook account and I'm flooded with a dozen new invitations to weekly beer pong tournaments around the country. You know how annoying those things are.

Once upon a time, the idea of traveling out-of-state to play beer pong was unheard of. For one, you didn't know where to travel to. And if you did know where to go, you didn't know if you could trust whoever was running the tournament. And if you could trust who was running the tournament, you had to determine whether or not the prize was worth the time and effort. Since beer pong was not standardized until the last couple of years, you then had to find out what kind of rules would be used. It was a process.

But now, every so often you'll see a tournament invitation that stands out. By the end of the day, news will have spread throughout the beer pong community and the top players are already looking for partners. It's amazing. Most seasoned players who frequent BPONG.COM know what tournaments are legit and which ones to skip. Except for that whole King of the Cups thing, we're a fairly intelligent group of people.

Beer pong players can be a deceiving bunch. Most people don't realize how smart we are. The way the media portrays beer pong as a drinking game certainly doesn't help. They say any press is good press, but when every article or video about beer pong focuses on the same negative aspects of the sport it becomes an uphill battle to legitimize. Read almost any article covering the World Series of Beer Pong and you'd have yourself believing you're a raging alcoholic by the end of it. Taken out of context, any one of us can be made to look like a drunken idiot. We drink things we shouldn't drink, we eat things we shouldn't eat, we throw things we shouldn't throw, and we say things we shouldn't say. That's just how we are on the table, it's not real life. Except for Captain Canada, who's probably already well on his way to blacking out today.

A lot of us choose to lead a beer pong "double life." I've always talked about it at work because it's a good ice breaker and it's hilarious—but I'm willing to bet that some of the loudest people on the beer pong table are some of the most professional and hardest worker-cyber-ducks outside of the sport. We don't read about how some of the game's best players are successful businesspeople, engineers, rocket scientists, or are attending law school or medical school, but they are, and beer pong is their competitive outlet. Some of us do some really stupid stuff during the course of a beer pong game. But what we lack in common sense we make up for by designing logos, organizing leagues and tournaments, or creating sophisticated tournament software or websites which rival the companies we work for. We all have our motivations for playing, whether it's the money, the competition, the glory, or the drinking. I can't stand when everyone gets lumped into one.

Every year, I'm amazed that hundreds of beer pong players from around the world find their way to Las Vegas for The World Series of Beer Pong. They don't know how to use PayPal or a credit card, but they find a way regardless. Some can't even write (or think) in complete sentences yet can still find the cheapest possible way to Las Vegas by comparing multiple scenarios on dozens of travel websites and from there find a way to stretch $100 over the course of a week. If there's a cheap place to eat or drink, a beer pong player will find it.

Our ability to adapt is one of the biggest reasons why I love being a part of the beer pong community. If we're traveling without our beer pong equipment, we'll MacGyver the shit out of anything we can find to construct something. If we are getting overcharged for beer, we'll find the gift shop that's selling it for cheaper halfway across the casino and stock up. Some of us can barely count, but come Day 3 of The World Series of Beer Pong, we can recite our cup differential with complete accuracy. Only a beer pong player could take something like Skype and find a way to turn it into an international, money-making, beer pong platform. That's just how we roll.

This weekend, some of the best players in the world will be making their way to Maryland for the $2,500 Spring Classic. In a few more weeks, they will find their way to the Drunken Bear $10,000 tournament. So keep sending those Facebook invitations... we'll find a way to get there.

By: Jeff Barnes

The year is 2010 and it's January in Las Vegas. Team Smashing Time has just put the finishing touches on their second consecutive World Series of Beer Pong title. The team's star player, Michael "Pop" Popielarski, is sleeping in his bed while members of Smashing Time's entourage enjoy the spoils of Vegas. In walks Maryland player Sean Foster, who promptly removes the shoes from the 6'6" sleeping giant.

"I want to know what it's like to walk in the shoes of a champion for a day," Foster says.

When it comes to beer pong champions, there's Smashing Time and then there's everyone else. Winners of the $50,000 World Series of Beer Pong IV, the $25,000 Atlantic City Beer Pong Championship, and the $50,000 World Series of Beer Pong V, the duo of Popielarski and the louder, more theatric Ron Hamilton have more cash winnings from three beer pong tournaments then many of their fellow players have earned in their entire professional lives.

Pop & Ron

While much of the spotlight tends to focus on the wild antics of the much bigger, much louder Hamilton, it's the near-flawless shooting of Popielarski which still lands him at the top of most player rankings. Although Smashing Time came up short in its attempt to three-peat this year in Las Vegas, most people still consider Pop the player to beat. In a sport usually dominated by drunkenness, distractions and disputes as to who is better than whom, for the most part the New York native chooses to let his play do the talking.

"I just want what I deserve. I want to win. I'm not into all the hype like some of the other guys are."

Popielarski, 26, is not what you'd expect from a two-time world champion. With three major championships, multiple singles championships, a Beast of the East title, numerous Satellite™ tournament victories and feature articles in ESPN, Time and Maxim, among other things, you would expect some cockiness. But rather than dwell on past successes, Popielarski instead seems more interested in seeing the sport of beer pong continue to grow as a whole.

It was in that now-infamous ESPN article that Ron Hamilton told writer Rick Reilly he chugged a bottle of Jack Daniels during the final day of competition. Popielarski, who recently earned his degree in business management, apparently was paying attention in class.

"That made us look like idiots," he said. "That's not helping the sport grow."

It's fitting that Popielarski is known as "Pop" to most people. With perhaps the most decorated career in beer pong history, he has been doing it better and for longer than most players. One of the most recognizable people in the international beer pong community, Pop finds himself talking to a lot of new players at tournaments and on Facebook. He says he doesn't turn down a single friend request, and answers every question he is asked, even if it takes him a while.

His string of successes extends far beyond the final tables in Las Vegas. In some ways, he has become a victim of his own success. In bars and tournaments around New York, he has found himself banned from competition, with owners and organizers fearful he will scare away the prospective players. Despite the restrictions, however, Pop says his inclusion on the first D.O.E. Top 25 list and tournaments with partner restrictions have made him a better player.

New Talent, Old Rivals

Restrictions have also helped create some other great players, too. Pop began playing regularly with the young, baby-faced Jon Basile last year when the first Top 25 restrictions came about. Since last year, Basile has gone from relatively unknown to being mentioned among the top five. While Pop can certainly take credit for much of Basile's success, he also says that playing with Basile now makes him a different kind of player. He compares playing with Basile to playing with a better-shooting version of Ron Hamilton.

"I learned how to share," Pop says. "It's always been all on me."

A beer pong veteran, Pop has seen it all in his journey from the beginning to the top. He's been a part of almost every major rule and equipment change. He says it helps keeps his game sharp. On any given night he will be playing tournaments with different rules, different tables, different balls, and different cups. On top of that, he's seen the level of his competition increase dramatically.

"Beer pong now is not what it was five years ago," he says. "I only had like 6, 7, 8 guys to worry about. Now you have 15-20 guys to worry about. And we really do get everyone's best, no matter how good or bad they are."

But Pop is not without his detractors. A semi-public feud has developed on both Facebook and the BPONG forums between Pop and Kevin Kessler. The two fell short playing together in Atlantic City this past summer, and most recently Pop has criticized Kessler for allegedly targeting his prospective partners for upcoming tournaments.

"I just don't like the way he conducts business," Pop says.



Beer Pong As A Sport

Popielarski's most important battle, he says, is furthering the legitimacy of beer pong as a sport. While the debate of whether or not beer pong is a sport has been argued for years, Pop believes there are two ways to look at beer pong.

"Is it a sport or isn't it? I look at non-leaning [beer pong] as a game—it's more fun and less serious. I look at leaning [beer pong] as a sport."

Almost every beer pong player learns the game in the house party setting, Pop says. Anyone can play a game of beer pong at a house party and have fun without taking it too seriously. It's the level of skill involved and high-shooting percentages which distance the competitive sport from the traditional house party game.

Pop also believes that if players want beer pong to be taken more seriously as a sport, they need to start acting more seriously as players. He thinks teams should look more like teams, with each team wearing a shirt or uniform. He also thinks distractions have become a little too much, with some players making the distractions and trash talk their sole motivation to play.

"[Excessive distractions] are a rookie game," he says. "That makes it look like a game, not a sport."

Pop believes that if things like billiards, darts, poker and Scrabble have a home on ESPN, than beer pong certainly belongs. He contrasts a game of beer pong to a basketball game, which lacks clutch moments until the final moments of play.

"You have to be clutch 10 times in one game of beer pong, not just once."

Upcoming Competition

With the sun setting on the Smashing Time chapter of his career, Pop has a slew of top players lined up for the next four major tournaments. This weekend he will defend his title at the $2,500 Maryland Spring Classic with Vince Bolhuis. In April, he will be teaming up with Maryland's Jordan McAllister for the Drunken Bear $10,000 tournament and Kyle Williams for the SJ Pong $5,000 tournament. And then this summer, he will be teaming up for his first major with his protégé, Jon Basile, for the World Pong Tour's $25,000 Atlantic City Championship.

After that, he is not sure who he will be playing with in this year's World Series of Beer Pong. He hasn't ruled out a reunion with Ron Hamilton somewhere down the line.

"I never really close the book on anyone," Pop says. Despite his success, Pop wants to be known as more than just another beer pong player.

"People think I'm just some dumb kid who plays beer pong and is drunk all the time, [but] I was just smart enough to realize a talent and was able to cash in on it. If you have a talent, go ahead and use it."