This Week in Weird Sports: Cup Stacking

The answer to the timeless teenage question: “What do I do if I’m un-athletic and suck at Magic: The Gathering?”

The answer to the timeless teenage question: “What do I do if I’m un-athletic and suck at Magic: The Gathering?”



Photo credit goes to the third arm (sprouting out of this guy’s face?) that must have snapped this shot.




If you’ve lived a day on the Internet, you’ve seen the countless “stacking” videos on youtube, like this one or this one. If you’re like us, you thought, “Oh, isn’t that nice. They found something for autistic children to do.” But we’re soulless monsters who hate rainbows and buy foreign-ly sourced produce, so our opinion is, at best, to be treated with the caution normally reserved for opening a text from Brett Favre.


Anyway, this game goes beyond oddly popular videos: Cup stacking (or speed/sport stacking) has an organizing body, the WSAA (not to be confused with the other WSAA). The association is kind enough to provide a 10-page rulebook, which we skimmed while eating a burrito. The game seems to work like this: one person, as fast as he can, stacks and unstacks three groups of three cups (sometimes six) into a pyramid. Once this impressive edifice is constructed, the player has to unstack the cups as fast as he guacamole (we might have gotten burrito on that last part).


If you’re interested in testing your stacking skills, there are tournaments held all around the world…maybe one near you! (If you live near Bangkok.)

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