Beer Pong Calculator

The volume side of this calculation is simple and the pharmacology is not. Beer required equals cups per side times two sides times fill volume times games, so a regulation rack of 10 cups per side at 4 oz per cup puts 80 fl oz in play per game, about 6.7 twelve-ounce cans. The dose that matters, though, is pure ethanol. A US standard drink is 0.6 fl oz, about 14 g, of ethanol, so a 4 oz cup of 5 percent beer is only a third of a standard drink. The losing side clears its entire rack: 10 cups is 40 oz, and split between two players that is roughly 1.7 standard drinks each per game lost. Estimated blood alcohol uses the Widmark relationship, in which BAC equals grams of ethanol divided by body mass times a distribution factor, with elimination subtracted at about 0.015 percent per hour. The factor applied here is 0.68, an average male value; women average closer to 0.55 because of a lower body water fraction, so the output understates their BAC. Treat the number as an order-of-magnitude estimate only, since it ignores food in the stomach, drinking rate, sex, medication and genetic variation in alcohol dehydrogenase activity. Two thresholds are worth holding in view: four drinks for women or five for men within roughly two hours meets the NIAAA definition of binge drinking, a level an ordinary game night crosses easily, and 0.08 percent is the per se driving limit in every US state except Utah, which uses 0.05 percent.

The paddle version of the game is generally traced to Dartmouth College fraternities in the 1950s and 1960s, where cups were set on a ping pong table and struck at with paddles, and the name beer pong attached to it there. The thrown-ball version, played without paddles, spread through northeastern colleges in the 1980s and is widely called Beirut, with competing origin claims from Lehigh and Bucknell. None of these accounts rests on documentary evidence; the game was transmitted between campuses orally rather than codified. Standardization came only with organized play. The World Series of Beer Pong was first held in Las Vegas in 2006, and its published rules fixed the 8-foot table, the ten-cup triangle and the allowance of two reracks per team that most house rules now echo. The measurement half of the calculation has a far firmer lineage. Erik Widmark, a Swedish physician and chemist, published the equation relating ingested ethanol to blood concentration in 1932, and it remains the foundation of forensic alcohol calculation worldwide. The US standard drink of 0.6 fl oz of pure ethanol was defined for public health surveillance and adopted through the NIAAA and the Dietary Guidelines, giving a single unit comparable across beer, wine and spirits. States converged on a 0.08 percent per se driving limit after federal highway funding was tied to adoption in 2000, with the last states complying by 2004.