How To Throw Plates For Maximum Impact and Minimum Damage

There comes a time in everyone’s life when throwing plates in quick succession becomes a necessity. For me, it was when my boyfriend haphazardly rearranged my entire living room while I was asleep. (We’ll just overlook the details as to why he did that, okay?) Whatever prompts you to delve into this sport, there are a few things you should know in order to maximize the impact of your fury while minimizing the damage to your home. If the event takes place at your boyfriend’s home, then you might not care about the damage part.

First thing you will need, of course, is plates. Some plates are better than others. Dinner plates provide a much larger object for your primary target and onlookers to dodge than salad plates do, and they make a nice sturdy sound when they come into contact with walls and furniture. Which leads us to the second important aspect of the plates to be used. They must be of good quality. I personally prefer Wedgwood fine china. Wedgwood is made so well that it can hit almost anything and suffer barely more than a chip. If, on the other hand, you’re going for the hailstorm effect, you’ll want to use something of a lower quality like Corelle dinnerware, which essentially explodes into a gazillion shards of death. This can be enormously fulfilling, but someone will eventually have to clean up the mess. You won’t want to diminish the joy of your sport, so be sure that the person who will have to clean up is anyone other than you.

Once you have the right plates in your arsenal, you’ll need to have them positioned for ease of use. In my case, my kitchen had a bar-top pass-through to the living room. This is an ideal setup, but a china cabinet in the dining room that has a clear path to your target room is also sufficient. You will want to keep your dinner plates in a cabinet close to your chosen launch point so you can rapid-fire at will. If you’d like to add another dimension to the session, you can use dirty plates from the dishwasher. There’s nothing better than brown gravy on the white loveseat to say how much you care.

Now that our setup is complete, let’s talk about technique. If you can pitch a softball and hit the catcher’s mitt, then you can just hurl the dang plate and see what happens. Some people won’t have any idea what they’re doing and just throw the plates on the floor, which may be somewhat artful but not very sportsmanlike. I find that the Frisbee technique works best. I’ve thrown a lot of Frisbees in my time, so this was a natural choice. I also like the fact that I can get the plates to skip off of walls and other objects so they really ricochet around the room. This is exceptionally entertaining when there are multiple people in the vicinity. I also like to mix it up a bit by flinging some straight-arrow shots with extra force. A large dent on the corner of the bookcase will be a lovely reminder of your skill and passion for years to come.

The last point is something I alluded to in the previous step: the number of people in the target zone. You can really play around with this to discover your skill. For maximum impact, you’ll probably want to have at least 3 people in the target zone. It’s great if you have one person who avoids direct contact with the projectiles, as they will often provide useful commentary, such as, “Damn, those are some quality plates!”

So prepare your playing field, practice your technique, and let the plates fall where they may!