Video: World Record House of Playing Cards

(CBS)  A 34-year-old American has broken his own world record by building the largest free-standing house of playing cards ever recorded.

Bryan Berg set the new Guinness World Record Wednesday by building a giant replica of the Venetian Macau hotel and casino inside the resort in China's gambling hub.

The structure used a total of 218,792 playing cards and took 44 days to complete. Completed, it is 35 feet long, 10 feet tall, and weighs 600 pounds.

"I can't help it, I was trained as an architect and I have taken just enough structural engineering to be dangerous," said Berg, who has a master's degree from Harvard's Graduate School of Design. "When I'm in there working - figuring out how to build something - even though I'm sort of playing around with playing cards, it's really like a real construction project. Because you have to engineer every single adjacency and every support that's supporting everything above."

Berg had some close calls during construction - including several collapses.

The 1.2 million square-foot Venetian Macao Resort Hotel is the world's largest resort hotel.

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[bobnjersey]

[The structure used a total of 218,792 playing cards and took 44 days to complete. Completed, it is 35 feet long, 10 feet tall, and weighs 600 pounds. ]

buying cards in dozen pack quantities would cost about $1.30/pack (52 per pack). this would be roughly 2.5 cents per card. 218k cards at 2.5 cents per card is roughly $5500 in cards. i would suppose he might have had a playing card company sponsor him ... thereby reducing his playing card budget to $0.

[unibarbie]

SO is this guy a virgin or what?

[rightbehind]

We all know this is not the record. It was the bush years. A house of cards come crashing down from coast to coast.

[CBSisCommunist5]

just wait until the Obama years