One of the best parts of each year is when you get to reconvene with your old prep school pals in either Cambridge or the Have for the world’s largest pissing contest, otherwise known as the Game. Hosting your Harvard friends might seem easy, but DON’T BE FOOLED. The Real Game is won not at the Yale Bowl, but the night before. It’s like, the opposite of Waterloo and the fields of Eton, except if you look at Old Campus as the field — in which case it’s the exact same thing.

How to host Harvarders is most important if you’re a freshman: you haven’t been home yet since the beginning of school, and so you have yet to fully learn the art of lying about social success. Sure, you call your mom every once in a while to tell her about “all the really close friends that you’ve made,” but you’ve never had to fake that reality in person. Now you have to, which is terrifying, but remember: Cantabs have, for whatever reason, far worse social skills than Yalies. It’s just a proven fact. And now you have to rub that in their faces by partying excessively hard and just generally being more awesome than they.

What to Do:
1. Own them at beer pong, proving how many skillz you’ve picked up since graduation.
2. Go to Pance Party, find the hottest person you can to make out with you all over the place. Avoid if your Harvard friend is better looking than you (but let’s be real, all Harvard kids are busted).
3. Go to DKE and SAE and party with athletes, who really know how to throw down.
4. Drunkenly take them to Ivy Noodle at the end of the night for the best meal of their lives.

What Not to Do:
1. Don’t go to the party hosted by the Phoenix (one of their snooty final clubs) at Alchemy. The party won’t be sweet, but in case it is, you don’t want to have to live up to comparisons.
2. Whatever you do, don’t vomit. Unless you’re planning to immediately rally, in which case, GO FOR IT. Then you’re just hardcore.
3. Don’t drunkenly admit to them that sometimes you feel a little lost, and that you haven’t met anyone you really connect with, and that you miss high school where you were a big fish in a little pond. Fake it ’till you make it, kids.

For more coverage of the Harvard-Yale Game 2009, check out our Game topic page!