Bryan Berg gave a (very gentle) sigh of relief when he finally completed the world’s largest ‘house of cards’.
The US architect took 44 days and 4,051 decks of cards to create a replica of a Las Vegas-style strip in the world’s biggest casino.
Crowds watched in awe as the last of the 218,792 cards was yesterday placed on a model of The Venetian hotel in Macau south-east Asia.
He had earlier completed the Plaza and Sands hotel to break his own Guinness World Record for stacking free-standing cards.
‘This has been the most ambitious project I have undertaken to date,’ Mr Berg said.
‘It’s like a real construction project because you have to engineer every single adjacency and every support that’s supporting everything above.’
Mr Berg was inspired to take up the hobby by his grandfather and was eager to pass on his stacking skills to youngsters while his project was under construction at The Venetian which sits at the heart of the Cotai Strip.
No tape or glue can be used in card stacking and to prove that Mr Berg has complied with the rules he will publicly knock down his 10.5m-long (35ft) construction in ten days time.
The cards used in the record attempt, if laid end to end, would stretch more than 17km (10 miles) and weigh more than 227kg (500lb). No wonder he stepped away very carefully.
Guinness created a new record for the largest house of free-standing playing cards to recognise a replica of Cinderella’s castle that Bryan Berg made for Walt Disney World in 2004.
Mr Berg first broke the world record for the tallest house of cards in 1992 at the age of 17, with a 4.67m (14ft 6in) tower.
His most recent tallest record was a 7.62m (25ft ) tower built at the African-American Museum at Fair Park in Dallas, Texas, in 2007.
/Metro.co.uk/Click photos to enlarge: