It has been quite a while since we last visited the Corner. People have been asking me lately about the hiatus in this blog, to which I respond, “This whole website is my blog!” Seriously I would love to have the time to write an issue of the Corner every week, but with everything else I just can’t pull it off. I’ve tried before and I’ll try again now, if anybody is interested in joining me in the SWBP blog circuit please let me know and I’ll set you up! Seriously, anybody who can write even half-decent and has stuff to say, let me know!
Also I wanted to let you know that I’m going to be making a change to the tone of this blog. Up until now I’ve been using it as a method of delivering news and facts to the community, but since the website has developed to the point where that is no longer necessary, the blog has fallen on the wayside. Instead, I am going to use this as a place to vent. So here’s the disclaimer: what’s said in this blog doesn’t represent the opinions of Southwest Beer Pong (an organization bigger than any one person). I won’t be writing this as President of SWBP, I’ll be writing it as just another avid ponger with an opinion.
Now that that’s out of the way…
Pong Legalized
There’s a headline I never thought I’d have to write. Most of you know about the legal issues we faced here in the land of enchantment not too long ago. If you missed it, check out my writeup of the affair. New Mexico, always seeming to be behind on such things, just couldn’t grasp the idea of beer pong being something that was allowed. Now that it’s all been resolved and we got our wish, it is cause to celebrate. However, I do feel it brings up a pretty negative development in our legal system.
As a part of a democratic “free” country/state, it seems to me that the people should be free to do whatever they wish, until it’s proven they have violated a justified law (protecting the rights of others, yada yada). What we have now is that people are only free to do things once they’ve gotten permission to do so from a committee or director somewhere whose sole job seems to be to find ways to tell people no. When did we go from “innocent until proven guilty” to “guilty until proven innocent”? If I want to bring a chess board to a Starbucks to play against some friends should I have to ask someone in Santa Fe’s permission first? It’s a scary situation that’s been brought to light by our recent debacle, and I worry about where we are headed as a society.
Best of the Drama?
I told myself after last year’s drama and struggle over teams that I would never be the one to organize ABQ’s BoW squads again. I should have listened. When you have a group of people all driven by competition, and have to pick from that group a set number of individuals to represent the rest, you run into drama of the worst kind. We’re all friends and we support each other, but then the friendly faces disappear and the drive to win supersedes all.
I tried to avoid that this year by determining the teams by the most unbiased and performance based system we have available in theponglist. I figured (perhaps naively) that taking human opinion out of the equation would make the most people happy. I was incredibly wrong. People, who, for one reason or another, weren’t high in stats, found ways to discredit the system. I learned a lot about the personalities of our players when thrown into the heat of the moment. I was actually disappointed that a lot of people didn’t share my philosophy of the SWBP community. Gabe did a good job of explaining the point of view of a competitive person not wanting to spend money on what they would consider to be a waste of time. I can understand that point of view, I really can, but it does still sadden me that our players wouldn’t consider the trip to be a good time with good friends, regardless of how well they played. People think differently, I just wish the competition wouldn’t drive such a wedge of awkwardness into the community.
Inter-City Rivalry
This brings me to my next hot topic. The rivalry between us and our immediate neighbors, specifically Clovis and El Paso, has grown and changed quite a bit since the Series. I remember when SWBP was first starting out, and Clovis first made the transition into bars, when Elliot and I would talk about how to best grow our respective communities. Elliot’s idea was to create a rivalry between the two cities to get players hyped. The game is deeply seeded in competition, and nothing fuels competition more than a good home-state rivalry.
Back then it was difficult to get any real feeling of rivalry alive simply because both communities were so small and…let’s face it…we were all terrible at beer pong. Go back and watch any of our old finals videos and you’ll laugh at what we used to consider a “good game”.
But things have changed. With El Paso’s exponential rise we’ve got a pretty good group of players in our tri-city area. The talent pool has grown and so has the talent. The fact that picking the best BoW team is so difficult is proof of how good everyone has gotten out here. So good that players naturally want to brag about how good they are. This has sparked some pretty intense battles (mostly over facebook). The 10 Inches vs. Adventure Time rivalry has been one of the most hilarious things to watch develop…at least to me. To some the shit talk has gone too far. It’s come up several times now that certain players think that ABQ takes it too far.
So where exactly is the line when it comes to inter-city trash talk? To some it seems you should only talk trash about stuff that happens in game, and leave everything else out of it. For example: “You suck at pressure shots, remember how we killed you by 7-cups last game!” is fine, whereas “All (insert city) players smell like shit, how can you even throw a ball with all that stench?” is wrong. That’s just silly logic in my opinion. If shit talk is allowed, as it should be since that’s one of the best parts of the game, then talk shit!
So when is shit talk proper, and when is it inappropriate? Some believe that it should be confined to the period of time between the first shot and the last miss, once the game is over so is the shit talk. I really like this point of view because it encourages a friendly atmosphere within the community, but it makes rivalries incredibly difficult to keep going. I honestly don’t know the proper answer here. I generally want people to be civil to one another outside of the game, but I also love to support ABQ in a “We’re better than you!” sort of way. There probably isn’t a right answer here, but it’s something to consider.
For what it’s worth though, ABQ players are not the arrogant douches that many Clovis/EP players seem to think we are. Just because we like to promote rivalries with other cities doesn’t mean we actually think all Clovis players suck at life, or all El Paso players are jerks. I don’t know anyone that holds an opinion like that. You can’t deny how much fun it is to support your hometown, so instead of getting butt hurt let’s all just have some fun with it! We’re still going to support each other in the Series and any other major, and we’re still all Southwest. Less than three, kids.
9 Feet to Failure
So the World Pong Tour finally took the step people have been proposing as a possible solution to the casual/tournament player divide for years. I don’t like using clichés but they just come in handy at such obvious times as this…don’t fix what ain’t broke! The WSOBP has grown every single year it has taken place. More satellites take place every year. More communities pop up across the nation every year. The “problem” of getting house-game players into the tournament scene is not this doomsday clock that is holding the future of pong in its clutches and threatening to kill it, it doesn’t even exist!
Yah I understand that it’s a pain dealing with those one-time players who bitch and moan about elbows and leaners, thinking they’d win too if they played as much as we do. Every single competitive ponger has dealt with those guys. Guess what…those players aren’t going to convert, no matter what we do. The Series could be played with a ref at every table watching elbows, on regulation-sized ping-pong tables, with red solo cups and bounces/rollbacks/onfire/everything. Those guys still would get their asses kicked, because they suck and don’t want to put the time in to get better, and will find something to complain about before never returning.
Pandering to them solves nothing. Luckily there a still thousands of players who like the game, and also have the competitive spirit needed to adapt to a new rule-set and practice to get better. These are the guys that ensure each World Series is bigger and better than the previous. You wanna know how you keep these guys coming out? It’s not by changing the regulated equipment. You keep the established game intact and continue to promote it.
What does the WPT’s recent switch to a 9’ table do to help the pong scene? Absolutely nothing, except to generate controversy among the established community. What does it do to hurt the scene? It screws over the organizers. I don’t know how many times I’ll say it but I will keep saying it, you can’t expect organizers all over the country to purchase an entirely new inventory of tables. Most of us know that this game doesn’t generate much money for organizers, especially the smaller ones. They don’t have all kinds of expendable income to use on all new equipment, with no return on their previous stock.
This decision is basically a huge middle finger to the organizers of the national pong community. While I was previously looking forward to attending the WPT Championships in AC (and had plans to host a couple satellites!), I will no longer be going in light of the switch. I’m looking forward to the DB10k and the (hopeful) SoCal Open instead.
Well I think that’s enough venting for one issue. Can’t wait for the backlash…always feels good ;).
-Clawless
Also I wanted to let you know that I’m going to be making a change to the tone of this blog. Up until now I’ve been using it as a method of delivering news and facts to the community, but since the website has developed to the point where that is no longer necessary, the blog has fallen on the wayside. Instead, I am going to use this as a place to vent. So here’s the disclaimer: what’s said in this blog doesn’t represent the opinions of Southwest Beer Pong (an organization bigger than any one person). I won’t be writing this as President of SWBP, I’ll be writing it as just another avid ponger with an opinion.
Now that that’s out of the way…
Pong Legalized
There’s a headline I never thought I’d have to write. Most of you know about the legal issues we faced here in the land of enchantment not too long ago. If you missed it, check out my writeup of the affair. New Mexico, always seeming to be behind on such things, just couldn’t grasp the idea of beer pong being something that was allowed. Now that it’s all been resolved and we got our wish, it is cause to celebrate. However, I do feel it brings up a pretty negative development in our legal system.
As a part of a democratic “free” country/state, it seems to me that the people should be free to do whatever they wish, until it’s proven they have violated a justified law (protecting the rights of others, yada yada). What we have now is that people are only free to do things once they’ve gotten permission to do so from a committee or director somewhere whose sole job seems to be to find ways to tell people no. When did we go from “innocent until proven guilty” to “guilty until proven innocent”? If I want to bring a chess board to a Starbucks to play against some friends should I have to ask someone in Santa Fe’s permission first? It’s a scary situation that’s been brought to light by our recent debacle, and I worry about where we are headed as a society.
Best of the Drama?
I told myself after last year’s drama and struggle over teams that I would never be the one to organize ABQ’s BoW squads again. I should have listened. When you have a group of people all driven by competition, and have to pick from that group a set number of individuals to represent the rest, you run into drama of the worst kind. We’re all friends and we support each other, but then the friendly faces disappear and the drive to win supersedes all.
I tried to avoid that this year by determining the teams by the most unbiased and performance based system we have available in theponglist. I figured (perhaps naively) that taking human opinion out of the equation would make the most people happy. I was incredibly wrong. People, who, for one reason or another, weren’t high in stats, found ways to discredit the system. I learned a lot about the personalities of our players when thrown into the heat of the moment. I was actually disappointed that a lot of people didn’t share my philosophy of the SWBP community. Gabe did a good job of explaining the point of view of a competitive person not wanting to spend money on what they would consider to be a waste of time. I can understand that point of view, I really can, but it does still sadden me that our players wouldn’t consider the trip to be a good time with good friends, regardless of how well they played. People think differently, I just wish the competition wouldn’t drive such a wedge of awkwardness into the community.
Inter-City Rivalry
This brings me to my next hot topic. The rivalry between us and our immediate neighbors, specifically Clovis and El Paso, has grown and changed quite a bit since the Series. I remember when SWBP was first starting out, and Clovis first made the transition into bars, when Elliot and I would talk about how to best grow our respective communities. Elliot’s idea was to create a rivalry between the two cities to get players hyped. The game is deeply seeded in competition, and nothing fuels competition more than a good home-state rivalry.
Back then it was difficult to get any real feeling of rivalry alive simply because both communities were so small and…let’s face it…we were all terrible at beer pong. Go back and watch any of our old finals videos and you’ll laugh at what we used to consider a “good game”.
But things have changed. With El Paso’s exponential rise we’ve got a pretty good group of players in our tri-city area. The talent pool has grown and so has the talent. The fact that picking the best BoW team is so difficult is proof of how good everyone has gotten out here. So good that players naturally want to brag about how good they are. This has sparked some pretty intense battles (mostly over facebook). The 10 Inches vs. Adventure Time rivalry has been one of the most hilarious things to watch develop…at least to me. To some the shit talk has gone too far. It’s come up several times now that certain players think that ABQ takes it too far.
So where exactly is the line when it comes to inter-city trash talk? To some it seems you should only talk trash about stuff that happens in game, and leave everything else out of it. For example: “You suck at pressure shots, remember how we killed you by 7-cups last game!” is fine, whereas “All (insert city) players smell like shit, how can you even throw a ball with all that stench?” is wrong. That’s just silly logic in my opinion. If shit talk is allowed, as it should be since that’s one of the best parts of the game, then talk shit!
So when is shit talk proper, and when is it inappropriate? Some believe that it should be confined to the period of time between the first shot and the last miss, once the game is over so is the shit talk. I really like this point of view because it encourages a friendly atmosphere within the community, but it makes rivalries incredibly difficult to keep going. I honestly don’t know the proper answer here. I generally want people to be civil to one another outside of the game, but I also love to support ABQ in a “We’re better than you!” sort of way. There probably isn’t a right answer here, but it’s something to consider.
For what it’s worth though, ABQ players are not the arrogant douches that many Clovis/EP players seem to think we are. Just because we like to promote rivalries with other cities doesn’t mean we actually think all Clovis players suck at life, or all El Paso players are jerks. I don’t know anyone that holds an opinion like that. You can’t deny how much fun it is to support your hometown, so instead of getting butt hurt let’s all just have some fun with it! We’re still going to support each other in the Series and any other major, and we’re still all Southwest. Less than three, kids.
9 Feet to Failure
So the World Pong Tour finally took the step people have been proposing as a possible solution to the casual/tournament player divide for years. I don’t like using clichés but they just come in handy at such obvious times as this…don’t fix what ain’t broke! The WSOBP has grown every single year it has taken place. More satellites take place every year. More communities pop up across the nation every year. The “problem” of getting house-game players into the tournament scene is not this doomsday clock that is holding the future of pong in its clutches and threatening to kill it, it doesn’t even exist!
Yah I understand that it’s a pain dealing with those one-time players who bitch and moan about elbows and leaners, thinking they’d win too if they played as much as we do. Every single competitive ponger has dealt with those guys. Guess what…those players aren’t going to convert, no matter what we do. The Series could be played with a ref at every table watching elbows, on regulation-sized ping-pong tables, with red solo cups and bounces/rollbacks/onfire/everything. Those guys still would get their asses kicked, because they suck and don’t want to put the time in to get better, and will find something to complain about before never returning.
Pandering to them solves nothing. Luckily there a still thousands of players who like the game, and also have the competitive spirit needed to adapt to a new rule-set and practice to get better. These are the guys that ensure each World Series is bigger and better than the previous. You wanna know how you keep these guys coming out? It’s not by changing the regulated equipment. You keep the established game intact and continue to promote it.
What does the WPT’s recent switch to a 9’ table do to help the pong scene? Absolutely nothing, except to generate controversy among the established community. What does it do to hurt the scene? It screws over the organizers. I don’t know how many times I’ll say it but I will keep saying it, you can’t expect organizers all over the country to purchase an entirely new inventory of tables. Most of us know that this game doesn’t generate much money for organizers, especially the smaller ones. They don’t have all kinds of expendable income to use on all new equipment, with no return on their previous stock.
This decision is basically a huge middle finger to the organizers of the national pong community. While I was previously looking forward to attending the WPT Championships in AC (and had plans to host a couple satellites!), I will no longer be going in light of the switch. I’m looking forward to the DB10k and the (hopeful) SoCal Open instead.
Well I think that’s enough venting for one issue. Can’t wait for the backlash…always feels good ;).
-Clawless
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Upcoming Events
WSOBP 8 Satellite (Coed/40+)
May 5th, 2012
Southwest Beer Pong
Spectators Sports Bar
Guy/Guy Teams: $50
Guy/Girl Teams: $40
Girl/Girl Teams: $30
Preregistration Discount Here
Albuquerque, NM
May 5th, 2012
Southwest Beer Pong
Spectators Sports Bar
Guy/Guy Teams: $50
Guy/Girl Teams: $40
Girl/Girl Teams: $30
Preregistration Discount Here
Albuquerque, NM
2012 Southwest Beer Pong Championships
August 3rd-5th, 2012
Southwest Beer Pong
Spectators Sports Bar
Friday: WSOBP 8 Satellite
Saturday: $5k Doubles Main Event
Sunday: Singles Championships
Albuquerque, NM
August 3rd-5th, 2012
Southwest Beer Pong
Spectators Sports Bar
Friday: WSOBP 8 Satellite
Saturday: $5k Doubles Main Event
Sunday: Singles Championships
Albuquerque, NM