The Silliest World Records Set at the Casino

18/01/2018

The Guinness Book of World Records documents feats of extraordinary achievement, often performed by your average Jack or Jill with a natural flair for the brilliant or the downright bizarre. Of course, lots of world records are set by people desperate to say they are the best on the planet at something, even if it's sitting in a bath full of baked beans for 48 hours straight or balancing 500 beer mats on their forehead. Not exactly the peak of human evolution. Many extraordinary and inexplicable world records have been set in casinos down the years. These not-so-daring deeds rarely fail to raise a smile or an eyebrow in their retelling.

Flabbergasting Fast Food

You might expect the world's largest burger to be constructed by one of the multi-million dollar chains on the high street, but in 2012 this record was broken by the Black Bear Casino in Minnesota. Set up to celebrate their imaginatively-titled ‘Big Burger Bash’, the participants went about constructing a beefy behemoth that measured more than 10 feet in diameter and weighed in at over 2,000 pounds!

The bovine monstrosity took four hours to cook and had to be flipped by a crane, with punters tucking in to the lot when Guinness' verifiers had confirmed its status as the world’s biggest burger. We wonder if anybody asked for fries with that…

Suspicious Minds (Lots of Them)

Elvis Presley, the great rock and roll star of the 1950s and 60s, became synonymous with casino life following the release of his classic hit ‘Viva Las Vegas’: an ode to Sin City in all its glory. Intriguingly, the world record for the ‘Most Elvis Presley Impersonators in One Place’ (yes, that is a thing) was not set in Vegas but in North Carolina, a steady 2,000 mile jaunt away on the other side of America.

It was at Harrah’s Cherokee Casino Resort that some 895 Elvises gathered to create their own slice of history back in July 2014 – presumably shortly before also breaking the unofficial record for ‘Most Times Blue Suede Shoes Sung in Karaoke in One Afternoon’.

To Boldly Go Where No Casino Has Gone Before

If we told you that the official Guinness Book of World Records contains an entry for ‘Most Expensive Kidney Stone’, you’ll have an idea of the level of madness humanity has descended to. The record belongs to GoldenPalace.com, which purchased the kidney stone passed by Star Trek legend William Shatner for a whopping $25,000. It entered their museum of oddities, which also includes a potato in the shape of The Who guitarist Pete Townshend and a sandwich which bore a passing resemblance to the Virgin Mary (no, we're not making this up).

Working Nine to… Next Tuesday

Anybody who works the typical eight-hour day will experience peaks and troughs of energy throughout their shift: the productivity of mid-morning giving way to a period of malaise midway through the afternoon after lunch (or maybe that’s just us?). Croupiers and dealers are no different and due to the intensity of their job – standing up for hours on end and having to concentrate for long periods of time – they typically take a 20-minute break for every one hour worked.

That in itself highlights the extraordinary efforts of Stephen De Raffaele, a Maltese blackjack dealer who went above and beyond the call of duty back in August 2001. Working at the country’s Oracle Casino, De Raffaele was on a hot streak, raking in chips left, right and centre in a spell of dominance over the players gathered at his table. As is customary in such instances, he was persuaded to carry on working by his bosses while that record remained intact…

Although even they could not have predicted how long their dealer’s streak would last. Working eight hours shifts, with a 15 minute break in between each, De Raffaele would go on to work 51 hours straight – unsurprisingly, entering the world records for the longest single time spent dealing blackjack. Let's just hope he'd negotiated overtime pay with his manager beforehand.

House of Cards

No, not the Netflix series but an actual house of cards built by a casino enthusiast: American Bryan Berg constructed a replica of the Venetian Casino in Macau using just playing cards. The structure used more than 200,000 cards – or 4,000 decks – to create the homage, which stood more than 20 feet tall and entered the record books as the ‘largest house of cards ever built’, unsurprisingly. Amazingly, Berg’s construction required no tape or glue to hold the cards in place. Try and ‘build’ your own house using just five cards to see how just how incredible Berg’s feat is.