Reviews of products by Brandon Ruiz

The BTM Stack

reviewed by laurent kubaski (confirmed purchase)
Rating: ★★★★★ (Date Added: Sunday 08 February, 2026)

The author claims that the BTM Stack is a "Unique innovation with no precedent in historical stacks" even though this stack is almost the same as Patrick Dessi's CPAP stack published in 2009 (BTM uses the CHaSeD order and CPAP uses the SHoCkeD order) which itself is a variation of Richard Osterlind's Breakthrough Card System published in 1983.

Not only that, but the "brief summary of other stacks" section - which doesn't even mention the well-known Breakthrough Card System - is riddled with errors:

• The first printed record of a deterministic stack is not 1786 but 1593 (in "Giochi di Carte Bellissimi di Regola, et di Memoria").
• The first printed reference of the eight king stack is not 1888: for example, the earliest English reference is 1805 (in "The Expositor").
• The Nikola card system does not require "rote memorization" since the author provides a mnemonic system to learn the associations.
• The Bart Harding stack is not "Similar to Stebbins": the concepts are completely different.
• the Spanish edition of Mnemonica was not published in 1990 but in 2000.
• etc...

Because of all those reasons, I don't recommend this product: readers interested in an alternative to the Si Stebbins stack that's easier to learn than the Breakthrough Card System should have a look at Patrick Dessi's CPAP stack (2009) or Doug Dyment's DAO stack (2010).