Pot-limit Omaha expert and YouTube celebrity Joey Ingram likes strange prop bets very much. The host of PokerGO’s new show “Major Wager,” is sure he can learn to speak Mandarin fluently in one year and he’s putting $7,500 on the line against a pair of entrepreneurs, with a chance to win as much as $45,000 if he succeeds.
Hurricanes in the Caribbean this fall made the poker podcaster unable to swim a mile in the ocean to win a prop bet against billionaire Bill Perkins. That bet is on hold, but he’s moving on to another challenge, this time linguistic one.
This one won’t be easy though. According to Unabel.com, Mandarin, the world’s most popular language, is also the hardest language to learn for an English native speaker.
“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,” we read on Unabel.com.[/i
Joey Ingram has made many weird bets over the years but claims now this one is his “most unusual.” Joey is putting up $7,500 against Jonathan Bales and Peter Jennings, the owners of Fantasy Labs, a daily fantasy sports analytics platform.
To prove he has really learned Mandarin, Ingram must host a full 30-minute podcast on his YouTube channel in Chinese. He has one year to do it. How good in it must he become to win the bet?
[i]“We’re going to have 5 judges that will verify it,” he said in a recent YouTube post. “We’re going to have to pick the judges when it comes to that.”
How does he want to study to speak Chinese, the most difficult language to master?
“I don’t know. I’m going to watch Mandarin movies, listen to Mandarin music, I’m going to go to China and spend some time on the Mandarin grind. I don’t really know exactly what I’m going to do. I got a couple of really good apps I’m going to be using. I’ll be putting in many hours a day.”
Ingram announced his new prop bet on Twitter, and many of his fans aren’t too sure he can do it so fast.
Ingram said he’s willing to sacrifice 2000 hours if necessary. That’s the equivalent of working 40 hours per week for a year though (50 weeks, minus two weeks for vacation).
What do you think of his chances? Is it gonna be only words, but not in Chinese, that this bet ends up at or will we see a very interesting episode of his podcast one year form now?
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