Joey Ingram Accepts $45k Prop Bet to Speak Mandarin Within a Year

Nothing seems to get poker players more motivated to achieve some impressive feat than a good prop bet with plenty of money on the line. Whereas there is often a strong physical dimension to these wagers, such as extreme dieting or cycling huge distances within time constraints, poker pro Joe Ingram seems to enjoy a more cerebral challenge altogether.
Ingram’s past wagers, for instance, include completing 600,000 hands of online poker within a single month, playing 50,000 hands in just one day while making a profit, and earlier this year writing a 40,000-word poker book in less than 11 days.
A few months later after accomplishing the last task, Joey Ingram has accepted yet another unusual prop bet, this time betting that he could speak Mandarin fluently within one year. Despite it being considered the hardest language for an English speaker to learn, Ingram has bet $7,500 that he will be able to pull off the challenge, with two of his entrepreneur buddies betting $45,000 against him doing so. They may have made a shrewd wager, too, and as it explains on Unabel.com:
“Thanks to it being a tonal language, every sound in Mandarin’s phonetic transcription system pinyin has four distinct pronunciations. Add that to the fact that Chinese is a language rich in homophones and full of idioms and aphorisms picked up over the course of its long history, and Mandarin becomes arguably the most difficult language in the world for an English speaker to learn.”
At the end of one year, it will be determined whether Ingram was successfully in his endeavor following a 30-minute podcast conducted by the player in Mandarin over his YouTube channel. As to how he will go about becoming proficient in such a complex language, Ingram said that he would be devoting several hours a day learning the language via a number of good apps, which he can then put into practice by watching Mandarin movies, listening to Mandarin music, and eventually spending some time in China. All in all, Ingram said that he was prepared to put in as many as 2,000 hours if required.
This time around, however, it seems like Ingram may have bitten off more than he can chew, with few poker fans given him any chance of eventual success. Here are a couple of important points raised by his skeptics:
EBeckster
“My French Language Teacher told me it took him 7 years to be Fluent in Chinese and he lived there for at least 3 years. Good luck though”
mercurius_59
“Some of the smartest people in the military study 1.5yrs / 6hrs daily and still struggle — any less than 2k hours = drawing dead.”