Ryan Schrenk will be slamming with the best come April.
The 13-year-old Chesapeake Middle School student will be stacking and flipping POG milk caps April 2 during Pasadena's first official POG tournament.
Kathy McLane, the organizer, expects about 400 youngsters to register for the event, which will be held at her store, Kathy's New Venture Video in the 8300 block of Baltimore-Annapolis Blvd. in Pasadena.
"I'm so excited about this thing I can't stand myself," said Ms. McLane. About 35 children already have registered for the tournament. Prizes will include POG T-shirts, hats, binders, and door prizes.
POG is a trademark name for a brand of milk caps children use in playing a popular 1990s version of tiddlywinks.
A player takes a stack of the colorfully designed, half-dollar-size, cardboard disks and places them face-down. Then he takes a slightly heavier plastic disk, called a slammer, and slams it down on the top of the pile, hoping to overturn some of the milk caps.
The flipped caps are collected, and the players continue to stack and slam until all of the caps have been overturned. The player who ends up with the most milk caps wins.
The game originated in the 1920s in Hawaii, where the Haleakala Dairy's milk and juice bottle caps were hot commodities among youngsters. POG came from the acronym used for the dairy's passion fruit-orange-guava drink.
Cardboard milk containers replaced the glass containers, ending POG caps' reign, until 1991, when Hawaiian schoolteacher Blossom Galbiso introduced the game to her students.
The craze swept Hawaii, where 2 billion milk caps were sold or given away in a two-year period. The game traveled to California, then made its way east until it hit the coast last year.
Ms. McLane said that when she first began selling the milk caps and other paraphernalia associated with the game around Thanksgiving, her store made $400 to $500 a day.
"I got them in so early, everybody was coming to me. Retailers were coming to me," she said.
Today, she said she has "only about 10,000" milk caps in her store, ranging in price from 10 cents to 75 cents, but that she expects to have about 50,000 for the tournament.
Ryan Schrenk said he started collecting the milk caps last summer and now has about 600, including almost all of the caps in the two POG series. One is already worth about $15.
The milk caps come in a variety of designs. Some, made for collectors, feature movies such as "Star Trek," "Star Wars" and "Speed," sports figures including Michael Jordan, sports teams, Disney characters, Coca Cola logos, and official POG designs.
Slammers also can be elaborate. Some are relatively light, plastic pieces with various designs. Others are thick, heavy metal, aluminum, brass, or acrylic. The POG-brand slammers are also collectors items.
Other milk caps are just for playing the game. Popular designs include the eight ball, the yin-yang, the whale watch, and a series of skull and crossbones milk caps called Poison. Ms. McLane said the Poison milk caps had a role in one variation of the game.
When a player flips the Poison cap hidden in the pile, he cannot collect the other milk caps flipped in that turn.
During the tournament, players will be divided by age and will compete one-on-one in a best-of-three series. The winner of each game will be the first to flip six milk caps, rather than the person who can flip the most milk caps. The player who wins two games advances to the next round.
The $4 tournament registration fee buys a starter kit with 11 milk caps and a slammer.
The competition is open to all ages and will continue until the champion flips the last milk cap. The tournament begins at 10 a.m.
B6 For more information, call Ms. McLane at 544-7183.