How This Guy Stacks Playing Cards Impossibly High | Obsessed | WIRED

the old saying is you know like a house of cards so that must mean fragile that must mean imminent collapse I know that a house of cards can be way more stable than anyone thinks this harvard-educated designer draws on his background in architecture to build unbelievable structures out of cards they can hold bricks with stanley flowers and some are dozens of stories tall I don't really think there's a limit to how tall a house of cards could be like the limit is your ceiling and you know just having enough cards my name is Brian Berg and I'm a professional card stacker burger career and card stacking started when he was 8 years old he broke his first world record when he was in high school in 1992 since then he's broken several world records often beating his own previous record I know this will kind of sound crazy but I actually don't even know how many times I've done a Guinness project so I know I've done the world's largest house of cards twice tallest house of cards in 12 hours once and then the tallest house of cards I want to say I'm I've officially went after a record I think like I don't know six eight times at least and the one where he built the tallest house of cards in 12 hours it was on top of a fully loaded washing machine that was turned on and spinning at a thousand revolutions per minute guinness kind of worked hand in hand with us to create a new record category that was tallest house of cards in 12 hours with an asterisk on top of a loaded spinning washing machine that's not part of the category but you know just had to make it even more impossible of course I was like kind of terrified that I would get a couple hours into it and it would kind of start vibrating anyway it's just nuts sometimes what I have to do thing I always liked about the cards was it wasn't figured out you had to sort of invent your way through it you had to make it work when birds not chasing world records clients pay him to build card structures for events and commercials he's been stacking cards professionally since 1994 but he started building when he was just a little kid card playing has always been a big part of my mom's side of the family while you know everyone was refilling drinks you know taking a bathroom break my grandfather would oftentimes you know build a small house of cards with like one deck and it would get two or three or maybe four stories tall if it collapse and he you know curse and then the card plane would resume and so that was my real introduction to card stacking was my grandfather he did teach me a few things but I really don't use those techniques anymore everything else that I do is a sort of series of happy accidents that I've discovered along the way I'll have a lot of people come up to me and I'm working and they'll say you should have been an architect and I'm like well that's my real background Berg does have a degree in architecture and a master's in design from Harvard but by the time he went to college he was already an expert card house builder a craft defined by trial and error and one of the most critical discoveries he made was that the typical pyramid shape won't cut it all the engineers and architects out there I'll tell you that the triangle is the strongest shape and it is but it kind of relies on ends being fixed together or being forced to be together there's nothing forcing these anywhere other than gravity to the ground like you just saw so Berg relies on squares and right angles instead the primary technique is you know what I call the grid the grid is you know you're setting the cards at right angles at their midpoints to create basically a bunch of boxes for me like card stacking you know the more I figure out about it the more I'm able to do and the more I'm able to do it just sets me up for the next discovery there's the grid there's the the column that came out of the grid technique there's the wall that came out of the column technique I would say that the majority of things that I come up with now are some sort of a tangent of a tangent of a tangent of something else that I already knew how to do at every single project I sort of have a little observation that makes me better or I'll do something without even realizing it and think oh that worked or oh that looks cool and I just kind of keep adding it to my repertoire Burke recreated the Beijing Olympic Village and cards in a Chinese mall in 2008 for that I built the bird nest stadium which was another thing that I had no clue how I was gonna even possibly do that but I'm like yeah sure I'll do it you know I got thousands of people standing there watching me including my client like when I'm starting it and it's not working it's like falling over and I'm sitting there thinking what am I gonna do but you know that's the fun thing about it is you just have to invent your way out of the problem and keep moving bird built the world's tallest card structure in 2007 it stood just a smidge over 26 feet tall and for this one he tried something new he built with the card standing vertically instead of horizontally he had never used that method to go that tall when I built called latest version of the tallest house of cards that was a little bit intimidating because it was probably three times taller than I had ever used that technique before so I just you know took a risk and went for it so I really didn't know what would happen it required over a thousand decks of cards and took about a month to build and it stood and it was surprisingly strong so a thousand decks of cards you know built to you know into the world's tallest house of cards is you know somewhere in the neighborhood of a hundred and forty pounds which means that no sneeze is gonna knock that over it's actually gonna take a pretty big force so I was using a leaf blower to knock that house of cards down and the leaf blower started smoking and quit working during the implosion so I just like you know threw the leaf blower down and had to go after it with my hand so you know card house defeats leaf blower go figure Burke sometimes uses three to four cards instead of just one because adding weight to the structure adds stability it's just a lot more stable than they think it is you know is it fragile yes but is it gonna just fall down because you you know threw a penny at it or because you walk past it probably not and a lot of that is just because how many cards are involved you'll think about how heavy a stack of newspapers is or our stack of magazines it's really heavy when you forget about all of that mass and it's it's a it's more of a brick house less of a card house Bert used over 200,000 cards to build the world's largest card structure back in 2010 in this case it was basically a massive replica of the Venetian casino in Macau it was 4,000 x 45 days it's actually more than 45 days of work because the last week of it really didn't sleep and when he finished he used a tried-and-true method to knock it all down a giant fan Berger's built a couple of things with glue when clients asked him to but aside from these exceptions Berg is a card stacking purist I don't tape or glue the cards bend them or fold them or modify them in any way I think the thing that surprises people is that gluing is actually just insanely time intensive takes like a hundred times longer than just letting gravity line everything up for you when Berg was given 10 hours to build whatever he wanted he decided to try something he had never built before for this rocket you know when I got here I didn't exactly know how I was gonna do it I didn't exactly know how it would turn out but I had an idea and I knew that as I kind of started working through it that I'd figure out what I wanted to do he started by making sure the conditions were right there's always some sort of climactic consideration is there a subway outside you know down three stories but another one is the humidity so if it's too humid the cards will take on all this water vapor because they're made out of paper and they'll want to kind of curl up likewise if it's too dry they will do the same thing they'll kind of start to change shape Berg leaned on his architectural background to build the different elements of this rocket in this case the main structural design was a series of columns arranged around a hollow Center he designed as he went listening to his instincts like he always does one big surprise on this project was that I didn't finish covering outside of the rocket because I actually really liked the kind of lines chasing down it and so I just left it and you know I couldn't have built a central post in the middle and you know I could have built a sheer wall or two inside to stabilize it but I didn't for the sake of time and the cool thing about not doing any of those things is that it it created this totally Hollow structure that looks really cool without the skin on it so it's again happy accidents here's the thing about Berg's craft he can't move the things he builds and are usually in public spaces so almost everything he builds has to be destroyed shortly after finishing a question I get a lot is you know aren't you heartbroken when you you know to destroy one of your works and it's like well honestly no because people love it you know people aren't just drawn to destruction they like to see stuff you know collapse and fall you know it's never a good scene I think but when it's a house of cards it's just good clean fun I know it can't stay up forever I mean I can't take it home with me so might as well have a good time knocking it down and the other part of it is I sort of treat each implosion as a little bit of a a test the sort of structural nerd in me really likes seeing like what it can take and then you know witnessing that I go forward knowing that you know the project that I'm working on next it's just not gonna fall down randomly it helps me understand the limits I'm testing it and having a good time I'm knocking it down because I kind of have to and that almost more than anything has given me guts and those guts he developed meaning that he has no fear when he stands on a ladder and finishes these incredible architectural feats you know when I'm up there putting the last few cards on I'm not even remotely worried about it collapsing out from underneath me because I just know from experience that it's just not going to happen my track record of success with cards is just because you know it's the right mix of you know using what you know and just the right amount of risk and you know hope for the best

Channel: WIRED

Views: 2,405,971

Rating: 4.9196763 out of 5

Keywords: playing cards, stacking cards, card stacking, stacked cards, card stack, stack cards, wired obsessed, wired obsessed card stacking, card stacking wired obsessed, wired obsessed card stacks, card stacks wired, wired stack, how to stack cards, card stacking tutorial, house of cards, making a house of cards, best house of cards, highest card stack, wired bryan berg, bryan berg wired, bryan berg, bryan berg cards, playing card stack, cardstacker, cardstacker wired, wired

Id: SEBBj2BIBm8

Length: 11min 11sec (671 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 02 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/EndersGame_Reviewer]

Great to see a piece that actually shows something about how he does this!

Bryan Berg holds some impressive records - I've covered this and more in my article here: Playing Card World Records