Boat Races

An E-Week Boat Race, closely supervised for spillage by a Coord (white tank)

A Boat Race (Beer on a Table Race), is a drinking game played between two teams of equal numbers. It's a game of speed and cleanliness; each team will line up, drinking a beer participant by participant until completed. Majors and minors are assigned for spillage, there are variations to the rules as well.
Boat races have nothing to do with the nautical arts.
If nautical nonsense be something you wish, please visit Concrete Canoe

Vocabulary

Sub Two: This means your chug time is below two seconds. Think hard about what you've done to achieve this.
Anchor: In a two beer boat race, the order is from left to right to left (12344321). The person who drinks two beers in a row, in this case person #4, is the anchor.
Ace: Ace is the person who begins and ends the boat race on each team. This position is coveted for it's ability to change the outcome of the race; a lazy ace could ruin it, just as well as a speedy one could win it. Regulation Cup: This is the variation of plastic cups provided to the EUS by Sleeman; it holds 16oz, but the more important factor is the flexibility of the plastic. It is approximately equal to this model, and is a staple for any boat race.
Major: This is when an obscene amount of beer is spilled, which in the context of a boat race is approximately 3oz+. Every major will result in the addition of 5 seconds to the team's time.
Minor: This is when any amount of beer is spilled less than a major. Every minor will result in the addition of 2 seconds to the team's time. Differentiating between a Major and Minor is at the discretion of the referee/coord in charge.

Competitive Racing

Boat races are likely the most popular competition hosted at McGill, athletic, academic or beverage based. Competitive boat races consist of 10 racers on each team, with a minimum of 4 girls, each drinking 2 beers one at a time, as fast as possible, in a ladder format. What that means is that teammates lineup on one side of the table and drink a beer each going in one direction, before drinking a beer each coming back in the opposite direction, such that 1 person drinks 2 beers in a row in the middle of the race and one person drinks both the first and the last beer.
The conventional wisdom is this. You only compete with 4 girls. This is almost always an effective strategy in that you 5th girl will be slower than your 6th guy unless you are a nursing team or somehow have a disproportionate amount of girls. Typically teams will put a guy in the ace position, followed by 4 girls in the 2,3,4 and 5 spots respectively, before putting the remaining 5 guys in the 6,7,8,9 and 10 anchor spots. The order is typically chosen with those having the fastest 1 beer time going in a higher position (i.e your fastest person goes at 10 and drinks two beers consecutively midway through the race). Participants are typically chosen by finding people with the fastest one-beer chug times.
In trying to find those people with the fastest one-beer times possible, teams are often designed to have the fast “best case scenario” time possible rather than a team built to avoid going slowly. As a result, two groups of “chuggers” tend to be overrepresented in boat races:

1. those who spill and
2. those who slow down on their second beer, with the two groups being linked intricately.
   

The main problem that comes from picking people based on their best one-beer time is that you are picking based on what could be an anomaly, and that you are refusing to award consistency. The second issue that arises is that the competition involves drinking two beers and very rarely is any method used to evaluate someones ability to drink the second beer, or more aptly, to avoid slowing down too much.
Teams will add up each person’s fastest one beer chug, multiply it by 2 and say that they could complete the race in 60 or 70 seconds without acknowledging that people will likely not achieve their best time. What teams should be trying to do is minimize their deviation from a good score, to try to be great at being good rather than just trying to be amazing.
The most undervalued chuggers are:

1. Those who rarely spill
2. Those who, if given a few second to recover, can drink another beer with little to no drop-off.

Case Study

Take two chuggers who we will assume to have a representative sample of 40 chugs on (this may seem unrealistic; however, if you think so, it’s probably not for you). Chugger A</span> is a star; *They chug with an average first beer time of 1.7 seconds

• An average drop-off of 0.3 seconds
• Minors 15% of the time and majors 5% of the time

Chugger B</span> is solid.

• Their first beer time is 2.2 seconds,
• A drop off of only 0.1 second on the second beer
• They minor 7.5% of the time and doesn’t major.

To compare these two chuggers average time over two beers, one simply multiplies the one beer time (1BT) by 2, adds the drop-off time, multiplies the minor and major percentages by 2 (accounting for the two beers) and multiplies them by 2 and 5 seconds respectively. Chugger A

 2 * 1.7 + 0.3 + 0.15 * 2 * 2 + 0.05 * 2 * 5 = 3.4 + 0.3 + 0.6 + 0.5 = 4.8s

Chugger B

 2 * 2.2 + 0.1 + 0.075 * 2 * 2 + 0.0 * 2 * 5 = 4.4 + 0.1 + 0.3 + 0.0 = 4.8s

To be continued...

Variations

Anchor Only

This is a cruel race in which every participant must drink two cups in a row; i.e., everyone is an anchor. While one team must win, in truth everybody loses. Have trashbags at the ready.

Water, Coffee, etc.

Boat races extends to the speedy consumption of any good. Simply replace the first letter with the item of which you will be consuming (e.g. water= Woat Race, Ice Cream= Icoat Race, and so on), the same rules apply. All you can eat sushi is a great venue for this variation.