Mike Orr, of Cranberry Township, Pa., competes during the World Series of Beer Pong IV in Las Vegas on Sunday. With a $50,000 prize on the line, more than 400 teams flocked to the Flamingo hotel-casino on the Las Vegas Strip for a chance to bring their skills out of the bar and into the big time.

LAS VEGAS – Don’t let the smell of beer and the rock music fool you: Beer pong is a serious game. Some dare say a sport.

Granted, they tend to be grinning and drinking when they say it.

There was plenty of both going on this weekend at the World Series of Beer Pong IV, a loud and sloshy annual tournament that elevates a college fraternity house staple that includes ping pong balls and beer to an (almost) serious competition.

With a $50,000 prize on the line, more than 400 teams flocked to the Flamingo hotel-casino on the Las Vegas Strip for a chance to bring their skills out of the bar and into the big time. They wore matching uniforms and talked about focus and strategy.

Some also wore matching hot pants and talked about drinking more Pabst Blue Ribbon, the official beer of the tournament.

But the winner, Ron Hamilton, 25, of Brentwood, N.Y., preferred liquor to beer, and said he got ready for Sunday’s play by drinking a bottle of Jack Daniels.

“The key today was me getting real drunk and my partner not missing, and us coming out and proving we’re the best,” Hamilton said shortly after winning the top prize with Michael Popielarski, 25, of Massapequa, N.Y.

Hamilton said he and his partner — who form the team Smashing Time — met three years ago at a bar in Long Island.

“We’ve been unstoppable ever since,” he said. Hamilton said he planned to eliminate his personal debt and pay part of his mother’s mortgage with the winnings.

The game is played with cups of beer lined up like bowling pins on two ends of a 14-foot table. Team members alternate trying to toss a ping pong ball into the cups. The team that lands all the cups wins, the losers drink.

While one team is tossing, the other is free to create any sort of distraction, hence the skimpy hot pants. “The skill is the psyche out,” said competitor 23-year-old Ryan Young.

Beer pong came to prominence largely in East Coast college campuses in the late 1990s. It has recently left the campus for the mainstream.

More bars are setting up tables and weekly tournaments. A new documentary, “Last Cup: Road to the World Series of Beer Pong,” captures the growing pong culture. “Beer Pong” the video game was designed for Nintendo Co.’s popular Wii game system, but JV Games Inc. changed the name to “Pong Toss” amid complaints about appropriateness for teenagers. The World Series of Beer Pong has seen its ranks swell five fold since its first tournament in 2006.

Devotees say the game is a hit because it requires just enough skill and concentration that you can improve with practice, but not so much that you can’t also have a few while playing.

This World Series of Beer Pong is the brainchild of entrepreneurs Billy Gaines, Duncan Carroll and Ben “Skinny” Solnik. The trio met as students and beer pong aficionados at Carnegie Mellon University.

After graduation, they set out in their spare time to turn the game they loved into a moneymaker. Their site, bpong.com, sells tables, T-shirts, balls and other gear. The company organizes satellite tournaments and is a clearinghouse for detailed and occasionally heated conversation about the game’s rules. This one made it into the world series official rule book: “No player may take offense to anything said or done during a game, even if it involves their mother.”

But the world series’ rules don’t require the losers to drink, a deviation from original game, and a concession, perhaps, to critics. Beer pong and other drinking games have been targeted by those trying to curb binge drinking. Some college campuses have banned the game.

Gaines said beer pong is misunderstood.

“I know the media will say this is a chugging contest,” he said. “This is about a sport, it’s about a competition. They aren’t here to drink. Yeah, they’re drinking, but that’s not why they’re here.”

Associated Press writer Oskar Garcia contributed to this report.

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ON THE WEB

World Series of Beer Pong: www.bpong.com

“I will vote Democrat,” the 23-year-old hotel housekeeper said, in broken English, moments after registering to vote at a John McCain campaign booth in a Latino neighborhood market.

It’s an insult-to-injury moment for the Republican presidential candidate. And when it comes to McCain’s relationship with Hispanic voters, it’s not the first.

The man who once risked his career on an immigration reform bill that was embraced by Hispanics is now struggling to win these same voters, and falling perilously below the level of support that helped lift President Bush to the White House.

The candidate who won nearly 70 percent of Hispanic voters in his last bid for Senate in border-state Arizona is watching a first-term Illinois senator run away with those voters.

The pro-military, anti-abortion candidate is seeing Hispanics with similar views turn away en masse.

McCain’s campaign is pushing back on each of these fronts in Spanish-language radio and television ads and on-the-ground contact in the markets, Hispanic neighborhoods, military bases and churches across the southwest.

But polls show the candidate isn’t finding it easy to shake his biggest liability with these voters: the R after his name.

“The Republican Party pretty much alienated that voting bloc with the debate over immigration,” said Clarisa Arellano, a GOP activist in Colorado Springs, Colo., and a co-chair of McCain’s Hispanic coalition in the state. “There’s constant repetition that Sen. McCain is just another Republican, and negative campaigning works.”

McCain’s trouble is most evident in his own backyard — the swing states of Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. Hispanics in these states are a growing and critical segment of the electorate. They are largely of Mexican descent and trend Democratic, but in recent elections Republicans have successfully carved out just enough of their support to win.

Bush won 44 percent of Hispanic voters in New Mexico in 2004, when he eked out a win in the state by 6,000 votes, according to exit polling.

In a poll conducted last week, McCain was winning just 17 percent of Hispanic voters in the state. Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama had 62 percent, and 21 percent were undecided, according to the survey conducted by Research & Polling Inc. for the Albuquerque Journal.

McCain is faring somewhat better in national polls. A Gallup poll conducted last week showed 26 percent of Hispanics favoring McCain, while 64 percent preferred Obama.

McCain’s advocates on the ground say there’s no mistaking 2000 for 2008.

“I think Bush identified himself,” said Larry Trujillo, a former Colorado state legislator who is now pouring hours into McCain’s campaign in the state. “I don’t think (McCain’s) story is getting out, I don’t think it has resonated as loudly as I wish it would, as it should.”

Trujillo and other McCain backers said they find Hispanics know little of the senator’s record and lump him in with Republicans they have turned against.

“The problem we have, many people, instead of being with Obama, they’re anti-Bush. They want to vote against anything that represents Bush,” said Xavier Rivas, a Republican activist working on McCain’s Hispanic coalition in Las Vegas.

In conversation with voters, Rivas tries to highlight McCain’s ties to the community. He notes McCain was born on a military base in Panama, has traveled to Latin America and advocates free trade. He doesn’t see the campaign pushing these connections aggressively.

McCain’s campaign has been drawn into an television and radio advertising volley on immigration, an emotionally charged issue that isn’t playing in his favor.

While embraced by the largely pro-immigration population of Hispanics, McCain’s 2006 reform bill was pilloried by many conservatives. The debate left the senator caught between the right wing in his own party and the Hispanic voters he’s trying to court.

McCain tacked to the right during the primary, saying he would not reintroduce his own reform bill until the borders are more secure.

He’s finding it difficult to tack back.

“I do have to say that the primary departure from highlighting his positives on immigration, it lost some people,” Arellano said. “It is muddled. There isn’t enough time to go out there and talk to them about immigration with all these other issues to talk about.”

Even before the economic crisis, polls showed Hispanics prioritizing pocketbook concerns and looking to Democrats as stronger leaders on those issues.

The crisis is crowding out social issues that in 2004 moved some Hispanics, particularly evangelicals and Catholics, toward the Republican ticket. A Pew Hispanic Center survey from July showed only a third of Hispanics who attend church weekly were supporting McCain.

Still, his foot soldiers labor on.

As he makes the rounds of small businesses, Rivas hands out a small card designed to look like a prayer card. It bears an image of the candidate in front of the Mexican icon Our Lady of Guadalupe.

“What is most important is the person who supports our Hispanic community. John McCain has been with us yesterday, today and always,” it reads.

On a recent Saturday, volunteers manned a booth at the market, calling out in Spanish to shoppers like Florez over the din of Mexican pop music.

Their message was well received by Jesus Rosales, a 65-year-old retiree from Las Vegas.

Rosales said he believes “Republicans are stronger, they work harder.” He’s believed this since the 1980s, when he became a citizen under an amnesty program enacted by President Reagan.

Republican vice presidential candidate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, speaks during a campaign rally in Golden, Colo., Monday.

DENVER – When Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin made her first solo steps on the campaign trail, she stuck close to the sort of places an Alaska governor could feel at home.

Her first stop was a roller hockey rink in Carson City, Nev., a small state capital nestled next to the mountains. Next was a dusty indoor riding center in a Denver suburb, where Palin was introduced by local officials as a candidate in touch with “Western values and independence and self-reliance.”

In these first moves on the campaign trail without running mate John McCain, Palin frequently traded on her Western credentials to woo voters in a region the campaign believes will be particularly receptive to her Washington-outsider message and outdoorsy persona.

More than 600,000 Coloradans have fishing or hunting licenses. For some here, Palin’s love of moose hunting isn’t an exotic quirk. It’s a shared hobby.

In naming the first-term governor as his running mate, McCain, an Arizona senator, gave Republicans an all-Western ticket in a year when Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado, and to a lesser degree Montana, are in play. It’s a double billing that has allowed the Republicans to try to draw a sharp contrast with the Democrats in the race.

Neither Sens. Barack Obama of Illinois nor Joe Biden of Delaware have obvious ties to the interior West, and Obama’s Hawaii has little in common. Neither Democrat has made many attempts to play to the images Western voters have historically responded to. Almost no hats, no boots, no hunting. Yet.

That may be because McCain himself hasn’t fully cultivated his cowboy image. More than 25 years in Congress and an upbringing on military bases hasn’t helped, said Tom Cronin, a political science professor at Colorado College.

“He is really a creature of being a Navy brat and a Washington, D.C., guy. He doesn’t strike most people as a Westerner,” Cronin said.

There is no doubt Palin is a creature of the big skies and open spaces. A fishing enthusiast married to a champion snowmobile racer, she hails from about as far outside the Beltway as a politician can get. She regularly expounds standard messages of lower taxes and government reform, themes that jibe easily with Westerner’s libertarian streak.

“I reminded people there that government is not always the answer, in fact, too often government is the problem,” Palin said Saturday of her work in Alaska. “So, we’ve got back to basics.”

Republicans have wasted little time casting Obama and Biden as city slickers, unfamiliar with public land and water issues.

“There’s a very big contrast between these two tickets. One is a couple of senators from the big cities in the East Coast and one that is much more in line with the West,” Rep. Heather Wilson, R-N.M., told reporters this week, misplacing Obama’s Midwest home. “I kind of wonder whether the guy from Chicago and the guy from Delaware even know what a grazing permit is or how to get one or have even been in a BLM (Bureau of Land Management) office.”

Republicans and their allies have begun describing Obama-Biden as “antigun.” The National Rifle Association sent a flier to 4 million members this week saying Obama would be “the most antigun president in American history.”

The Obama campaign strongly rebuts such claims and argues McCain is the one out of touch with the pressing issues in the West.

They point to McCain’s gaffe in which he appeared to advocate renegotiating the Colorado River Compact, a position far out of step with Democrats and Republicans in the seven Western states that rely on the river for water. McCain has since said he does not want to renegotiate the compact.

Obama aides also note that McCain has advocated storing nuclear waste in Nevada, an unpopular position in the state.

“On Western issues, Barack Obama has positions that are light-years ahead of John McCain,” said Jim Messina, Obama campaign chief of staff. “This election isn’t about swagger. This election is about substance and who can bring about change.”

It may also be about the changing West.

An influx of transplants from places like California have driven political shifts to the left in many pockets, particularly in Colorado and Nevada. The housing crisis has rocked urban areas in both states, making the economy a top concern. Immigration continues to drive the political debate in many local races.

This could be where Palin’s affiliation with these key Western states ends. Alaska is 76 percent white. A spokeswoman says the governor has no known statements on comprehensive immigration reform. Alaska ranks 37th in the rate of foreclosures, according to the research firm RealtyTrac.

Nevada tops the list.

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ON THE WEB

McCain-Palin: www.johnmccain.com

Obama-Biden: www.barackobama.com

Investigators examine the scene after an experimental aircraft crashed into the house shortly after takeoff in North Las Vegas, Nev. on Friday. The pilot of the rear-propeller Velocity 173 RG aircraft and two people in the home were killed.

LAS VEGAS – An experimental aircraft crashed into a house and exploded shortly after takeoff Friday, killing the pilot and two people inside the home, authorities said.

The pilot of the home-built plane radioed that he was in trouble shortly after taking off from the North Las Vegas Airport, said Ian Gregor, a Federal Aviation Administration spokesman in Hawthorne, Calif.

A review of tower audio tapes showed the pilot told air controllers that he was going down, Gregor said.

Gregor said the plane couldn’t gain altitude.

Firefighters quickly doused an intense fire in the single-family stucco home in a working-class neighborhood southeast of a main runway at the airport. No other homes appeared damaged.

The plane appeared to have crashed through the roof over the living room.

A deputy fire chief, Kevin Brame, said authorities believe three people lived in the home, but one was not home at the time of the crash.

Neighbor Letizia Gonzalez, 17, said she awoke to a sound “like a bomb.”

“We came outside and we saw flames coming out of the house. We went to look and it started exploding even more,” she said. “They were nice people. It’s really sad.”

Gonzalez described the residents as a couple and the man’s adult son, who kept the yard neat and were friendly to neighbors.

The pilot and one resident of the house died in the 6:28 a.m. crash, and another person in the house died after being taken to University Medical Center in Las Vegas, Brame said.

The names of the dead were not immediately released.

Gregor characterized the rear-propeller Velocity 173 RG aircraft as “experimental” and said it can be built from a kit. FAA records showed the aircraft was certified for flight in 2002, he said, and was owned by a Las Vegas resident. The name of the owner was not released.

Gregor said FAA and National Transportation Safety Board investigators were traveling to North Las Vegas to investigate the crash.

North Las Vegas Airport is the second-busiest airport in Nevada after McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas, according to the airport’s Web site. It’s a busy hub for small planes and jets, and serves as a base for sightseeing flights to the Grand Canyon and other attractions.

Like the country’s original frontier settlers, the Democratic presidential hopeful is driven to this Republican-leaning region by a sense of opportunity — and a quest for power.

He desperately wants to win in GOP rival John McCain’s domain, and is playing hard in fast-growing Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico while watching, likely in vain, for a potential opening in Arizona — the state his opponent represents in the Senate.

“This region is very much in play,” said Brian Sanderoff, a nonpartisan pollster in Albuquerque, N.M. “The fact that McCain is a westerner from a nearby state will be offset by the Democratic mood of the nation, thereby making the race really competitive in the West.”

Tight polls and constant attention from both candidates attest to that little more than two months before the election.

Democrats dominate liberal coastal states, compete strongly in the swing-voting Midwest and typically cede the conservative South to Republicans. They have fiercely competed for the West in recent presidential elections, seemingly with little place else to turn to try to ramp up their electoral vote count.

They’ve had mixed success.

After decades of GOP dominance in presidential elections, Democrat Bill Clinton won Nevada and New Mexico in back-to-back elections in the 1990s, though Clinton won Colorado once and Arizona once. Democrat Al Gore won only New Mexico in 2000, and by a razor-thin margin, and Democrat John Kerry lost all four in 2004.

This year, for reasons both political and demographic, Obama has focused on Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico as top states to try to seize from Republicans in his bid to reach the 270 electoral votes needed to win the White House. Combined, the three offer 19 votes.

He has spent all summer pouring money and manpower into these states and will accept the party’s nomination next week at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. At least for now the fourth, Arizona, is getting almost no attention; McCain has a comfortable lead there in polls.

“If Obama’s able to win in these states it will have more to do with national trends against the Republican Party manifesting themselves than with political and demographic changes on the ground,” said Bob Loevy, an authority on Western politics at Colorado College in Colorado Springs. “That national shift has to be great enough to upset the historical pattern of these states tending to vote Republican for president.”

Democrats argue that a host of factors are coming together to give them their best chance in years in the West: a national malaise about the past eight years under the Republican President Bush, Democratic victories in recent statewide elections, and, primarily, an influx of new Democratic-leaning residents. They include scores of Hispanics drawn by jobs and land as well as urban liberals from the coastlines seeking recreation and retirement.

Voter registration numbers reflect the shifting landscape.

Across the region, Democratic signups have outpaced Republican over the past eight years. In Colorado, Arizona, New Mexico and Nevada, specifically, Republicans held a 124,000 advantage in party registration in November 2004. Now, the latest reports in the four states show Democrats with a 73,000 edge.

In part, the boost can be attributed to the extended and competitive Democratic primaries and the Obama campaign’s effort to tap into previously unregistered voting pools and the general public’s sour attitude toward the Bush-led GOP.

Pat Welding, a barber in the sprawling Las Vegas suburb of Henderson, typifies the trend.

He twice voted for Bush but abandoned the Republican Party recently after his son-in-law got called up for a second tour in Iraq.

“I registered Democratic because I was so mad,” Welding, 58, said while standing outside of his shop. He noted the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Bush’s justification for going to war, and said: “It’s a sham.” He will vote for Obama because “he’s talking about getting us out of there.”

Republicans are fighting to win back such party-switchers.

In Nevada’s Washoe County around Reno, the party has sent letters to about 1,200 voters who’ve dropped their Republican registration. The letter acknowledges “this has been a difficult year for most of us in many different ways,” does not name any Republican politicians and asks voters to come back to the party to support “a full slate of candidates.”

“The vote’s going to be tight. There’s no denying that,” said Heidi Smith, the county’s GOP chairwoman. But, she said, “I really think there are enough people who, I don’t want to say fear Barack Obama, but just don’t know him, and will end up voting for McCain.”

Like the rest of the country, voters in the West care deeply about the economy, gas prices and national security issues.

But they also consider candidates’ records and rhetoric on water rights, mining laws, federal land management, the environment and conservation — and that’s where McCain believes he has an edge given his Arizona roots and western ties.

Obama is emboldened by the fact that more left-leaning people now call the region home.

In Colorado, Interstate 25 cuts through Denver’s political power center, from Colorado Springs — home to the Air Force Academy and the headquarters of the conservative Focus on the Family — in the south to Boulder — chock full of liberals and environmentalists — up north. Rocky Mountain ski towns brim with upscale Democrats.

New Mexico’s Democratic areas are in the north around artsy Santa Fe and Taos, home to liberal transplants, and the southwest around Hispanic-heavy Las Cruces by the Mexican border. The state’s primary Republican region is in the southeast, called “Little Texas” because its right-leaning politics are akin to those of its next-door neighbor.

Most Nevadans live in the gambling hubs of Las Vegas and Reno. Compared with the rest of the state, those are more moderate areas that in recent decades have attracted retirees and young families drawn from the East and West coasts by the relatively low cost of living, as well as Hispanics looking for jobs in the tourism and construction industry.

Hispanics now account for about 20 percent of the population in Colorado, 25 percent in Nevada and a whopping 45 percent in New Mexico.

They are the political wild card because it’s uncertain how strongly they will turn out to vote.

As a Democrat, Obama has a formidable edge among them, but McCain’s ties to a nearby state, as well as his years of work in the Senate to change the immigration system, could help him lessen that margin much the same way Bush’s Texas roots and long relationship with Hispanics did in previous elections.

It won’t be easy for McCain.

Take Maria Alfaro, 51 and a housekeeper at the Las Vegas Hilton.

A Honduras native who became a U.S. citizen in June, Alfaro said her family is made up of Democrats and that, as a member of the local Culinary Workers Union, she will cast her first vote for Obama. “He’s focused about the workers and what he wants for our future,” Alfaro said. “He never forgot where he came from.”

She’s unhappy with the direction of the country and Bush’s Iraq policies. And, she doesn’t know much about McCain, saying: “We see him on the news, but we don’t pay much attention to him.”

By Liz Sidoti, Kathleen Hennessey

“Anyone who voted for me or caucused for me has so much more in common with Sen. Obama than Sen. McCain,” Clinton told her cheering audience in the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson. “Remember who we were fighting for in my campaign.”

Though she has endorsed her former rival, the speech was Clinton’s first appearance at a rally for Obama since the two appeared together in Unity, N.H., in June.

In another sign of growing detente between the House of Clinton and the House of Obama, Democrats said Bill Clinton would speak on the third night of this month’s national convention in Denver.

The Clintons’ efforts on Obama’s behalf may ease worries within the party that bad feelings from the long primary battle might erupt at the convention.

She said Friday that “we may have started on two separate paths, but we are on one journey now.” She said her long primary campaign against the Illinois senator showed her “his passion, his determination, his grace and his grit.”

The crowd let her know they still held her in high regard. They cheered Obama’s name and waved his campaign signs, but no mention of him won as loud a roar as Clinton’s introduction.

Still, she kept her focus on making his case, mentioning key Democratic issues where Obama and McCain would differ — U.S. Supreme Court nominations and health care reform, for example.

She noted Democrats have had difficultly reaching the White House recently and said Obama would need a surge in turnout — and registration — to win in November.

“Which is why Sen. Obama needs all of us, he needs us working for him,” she said.

Some of her backers have complained loudly about the way the only female candidate was treated during the primaries. And Clinton supporters have succeeded in getting language into the draft of the Democratic Party platform that says, “We believe that standing up for our country means standing up against sexism and all intolerance. Demeaning portrayals of women cheapen our debates, dampen the dreams of our daughters and deny us the contributions of too many. Responsibility lies with us all.”

The platform committee will be reviewing the draft Saturday in Pittsburgh.

After weeks of private talks about exactly what the Clintons will do at the national convention, no decision has been reached on whether delegates will actually hold a roll call vote that includes her candidacy.

Such a move could disrupt or distract from the point of the convention — showing a unified party raring to return a Democrat to the White House.

On the other hand, she has suggested that letting her supporters whoop and holler for her might provide a catharsis and help the party move on.

“It’s as old as, you know, Greek drama,” Sen. Clinton told supporters in a recent speech to a private gathering, which was later posted on the Web.

In this particular drama, the Clintons insist they are doing everything they can to get her supporters on board with Obama. Any reluctance, she says, is not hers, but comes from those who committed to her historic bid and are still unhappy that she did not prevail.

Clinton did not mention any convention disputes in her remarks Friday. She later told reporters the two campaigns were still in negotiations.

“We’re going to have a very clear message about how the campaign will cooperate and how the convention will be conducted when it’s appropriate to make that announcement,” she said.

Clinton and Obama may be on the same team, but in the past week they seemed to be running in different directions.

In political terms, one candidate’s catharsis is another’s car wreck. Conventions at which the party appears divided can prove disastrous to the nominee’s chances in the general election.

Obama told reporters Thursday he thought the negotiations with Clinton aides had gone “seamlessly,” but he also rejected the notion that there might be a need for emotional release on the part of some Democrats.

“I don’t think we’re looking for catharsis,” said Obama. “I think what we’re looking for is energy and excitement.”

Giving both Clintons big speeches at the convention may help generate excitement, but it also gives them a lot of attention at a gathering that’s supposed to be about the nominee, Obama.

And Bill Clinton in particular has at times seemed grudging in his praise of the man who stopped his wife’s able ascent.

Asked earlier this week if Obama was ready to be president, Clinton gave a philosophical, not political answer.

“You could argue that no one’s ever ready to be president. I mean, I certainly learned a lot about the job in the first year. You could argue that even if you’ve been vice president for eight years that no one can ever be fully ready for the pressures of the office and that everyone learns something, and something different. You could argue that,” Clinton said.

The Clintons argued through much of the primary that she, a former first lady, was ready to be president on “Day One,” suggesting Obama was not.

The Obama campaign is pretty tired of that argument, particularly since it has become a key refrain of Republican John McCain.

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On the Web

McCain campaign: www.johnmccain.com/

Obama campaign: www.barackobama.com/index.php

By Devlin Barrett, Kathleen Hennessey