Seriously guys?? Come on. I am a mother of two, have a 3bed house to keep clean, and work full time, do the school runs every day etc and I still have time to fit in 30-40k hands per month. Just sit in the evening for two hours each day, tha'ts it done, simple!

Well put young lady!

Yep there's no excuse. Clearly not grasping what they have been given by the horns.

Ooo got a dislike on that last post sorry lol

Ditto, probably why some haven't got time to play many hands!

It's fine guys you get a like from me. And yeah as I said before I also agree that you can play 30k even if you have a fairly busy schedule.

Haha, @CrazyKeri and everyone else is calling you out guys x-D

Was everyone aware that @CrazyKeri is a super badass? #IfUDontNoKnowUKnow

Haha love it when Keri comes on and just says how she feels. Don't F with Keri!

Last 12 hours of the challenge and i am really excited to see who did what!

Tbh reaching 40k hands/month isn't that easy. Well, if you play zoom it is easy, but if you play like 4-6 tables of reg speed tables, it is actual challenge. I play full time and even I often don't reach 40k mark, and not because I'm lazy. If I had a 8h/day job there would be 0% chance of me reaching that volume. And 12+ tabling for beginners is pointless since you can only auto-pilot rake back grind w/o actually getting better. Sorry for somewhat different opinion. GL!

@MilfGrinder

Really? What room are you playing on? Maybe they have exceptionally slow software? Sure 40k might be reasonably good if you never open more than 4 tables throughout the session and you table select aggressively (which means you're effectively playing 2-3 tables at a time) or you're playing PLO (which is slower than NLH and way harder to multi-table).

Don't get me wrong I'm not saying they should all open 12 tables and go into no-life mode. With how the stacking was going so far profit wise that would be suicidal. That being said math is pretty simple in this case. 6 tabling = 450-550 hands per hour depending on the software (Microgaming is actually slightly above average speed wise because even though they offer gigantic 2:00 time bank the give you slightly less time to make a decision than other popular poker rooms) so you need to play 2h per day to hit the minimum of 30k per month. 3h a day and you're crushing it. As @CrazyKeri said with proper time management you can apparently manage that with a full-time job and kids (which blows my mind actually and kudos to you @CrazyKeri for being awesome).

Well, I do aggressive table select, and last week I was averaging 330 hand/hour. So 40k hands would be 120h - 30h/week. If you play 5 days a week, it's like 6h a day on top of regular job, which is clearly a no-life option. I'm probably winning much more with my 330 hands/hour than all of the winning players from the stable combined. Of course I see why volume is so important for stakers, but I just don't get all the hate players are getting.

As I said before - zoom, easy, but probably with negative win rate for everyone in stable. But if players want to improve while playing, think about every decision, do a decent table selecting, therefore achieving positive win rate while spending decent part of their poker time into studying, there is no chance for 40k hands, give them a break.

I'll receive some hate in here for sure, but I just wanted to show some other perspective.

Hate is a big and unnecessary word in this situation. I'm just basing my messages on some basic math + experience and I feel like most folks commenting on the issue did just that (well some might have leaned more on the side of experience, and that's a bit harder to quantify, but still valid). You showed your experience and presented numbers that make sense. Nothing wrong with that.

Maximizing win rate over volume is a valid strategy, it might net you lower hourly than more balanced approach (or even one emphasizing grinding more), but the added education will help you maintain or even increase your edge/win rate. However - and with all due respect - if you're playing 300-500 hands per day you're not maximizing anything. You can still play that 30k without sacrificing your win rate (you can play 4-6 tables, table select aggressively, make a lot of notes, study a lot etc.). Perhaps you'll have to make some sacrifices as you approach 40-45k mark, but that's not important in the case of this particular discussion because according to the last volume update and many before that none of the staked players is close to that amount. And here's why averaging 300-500 hands per day can be really harmful. Let's say we have one very unlucky 10bb/100 crusher among the stakees (man I hope that's an actual word :P), if you assume around 80bb standard deviation (somewhat conservative when we talk about 6max NLH) then you can still theoretically have that player be losing like 10BI after 50k hands. It's not very likely, but possible and if he's averaging 400hands per day it will take him forever to realize he's actually amazing at poker (almost half a year! or 4 months with change to be more precise). If you get inspired by those assumptions and actually do some variance calculations you'll probably say that the overwhelming majority of 10bb/100 winners would be crushing. Fair enough, but let's say we have some unlucky 5bb/100 winners in the group. Still pretty great win rate especially nowadays, but now being down or break even after 50k hands is much more likely. Again with 400 hands per day average you need those 4-5 months to realize that you're actually a pretty great poker player. And what will happen to your mindset after 5 months of losing when you feel that you're doing everything right (and you do because in reality you're a significant winner). How likely are you to maintain your a-game (and subsequently your win rate) every session after 4-5 losing months? This is why it's so important to maintain that healthy, balanced 30k per month minimum and if you can push 40-45k while still learning and developing as a player that's even better.

Disclaimer: as I mentioned in some other posts I think that for the vast majority of poker players it's impossible to actually determine their win rate (they can't grind enough hands with adequate speed in a stable enough metagame), but we can make assumptions + just because we can't quantify something it doesn't mean that it doesn't exist.

I hope that's clear now. It's not about the hate or any emotions for that matter, not about trying to increase my @CrazyKeri's or whoever's worth at the expense of others ("Hey guys you all suck! You should be able to average 3k hands daily with ease because in 1997 I managed to play 400k hands in two weeks while maintaining a 30bb/100 win rate! Uphill! In the snow! Using my toaster!"). It's about helping PokerVIP community members improve.

Nice to see that you got one of those beauties too!

I certainly don't mean to blast anyone by the way Just the way I see it is its simple. Lots of people have busy lifestyles but there is no reason why once the evening comes, once the days commotion has settled, people can't sit and grind for a few hours, its not hard.

And I disagree with you @MilfGrinder as I only play 2 or 3 speed tables, mainly 2 and I manage it, so 4-6 reg tables is definitely doable. Its 30k hands per month by the way not 40k.

People need to see it like a job. PokerVIP are hiring you and you are in a contract to do the work. If you were contracted to work 2 hours per day and you just didn't bother turning up, you wouldn't last long. Maybe it ends up being more then 2 hours per day, but you made an agreement to get it done. Even if you work fulltime 5 days a week, you have the evenings and the weekend. You could even knock out 5-10k hands over a weekend if you had a busy week, its not unrealistic.

You just need to find a passion for it guys. Give it your all and make Jon proud, you've got a good thing going here!

Ive just read the last few pages of this only but I totally disagree.For example, I played over the weekend only including saturday night and most of Sunday. 4 Tablng and managed 9431 hands. It Really isn't difficult to achieve 30K or even 40K. Anyone that says it's difficult is not really being honest with the tiime thats being put in.

On the topic of hands/hr, @Milfgrinder has it spot on. Having played on BV for a while I'd say a rough estimate would be an average of 330 hands/hr 4 tabling - so yea playing wise you gotta average around 3hrs a day to hit 30k per month. However personally I think if you're just playing then you're wasting your time in staking - the point is to use all the coaching resources available to you to improve your game. Everyone in the staking apart from me atm are currently at 10nl (shout out to Olo getting moved up soon!). We're still beginners relatively. So if your aim is to improve as fast as you can and move up stakes, I'd say a conservative estimate for a good playing to studying ratio would be 70/30? Personally my ideal would be 50/50. So the honest truth in my opinion is that you need to have at least 4-5 hours per day on average to dedicate to poker if you wanna be part of staking under the current contract requirements. There are gonna be days where you can't devote any time to it and then you'll have to add another 3 hours to another day to make up the hands. If you miss a few days for a certain commitment, you'll have a backlog of 9-12hrs sometimes. If, as Milfgrinder points out there's a couple of days in the week you set aside as a break then you can add another hour to each of the other days assuming you don't bother making up the study time. In addition to this, when you are free to play there are gonna be days where you hit your stoploss early, days when you feel tilted and stop yourself from playing in a bad mindset, times when the games are particularly bad or aren't running. These are all excuses of course, if you can't handle them you shouldn't be here. One solution is to increase the number of tables you play - again though I would say for the majority of people this would be detrimental to their improvement in poker skill - @Jon-PokerVIP himself recommends that people play 4 tables if they can, as does @Harvie .

To answer the question of whether you can meet the staking targets while also having a full time job, well it depends. There are stories of a guy who used to make SNE each year while also having a full time job as a city banker. Jon will tell you that he manages to play 80k per month sometimes while still keeping up with his VIP Community managing commitments, family commitments etc. Though this is ofc playing many more tables. It's definitely possible. Personally in the 3-4 or so months I've been part of the staking team I've seen a fair few try to balance the two and failed. Just trying to prepare my stuff for going to uni this week has meant I haven't been on track hands-wise for this month. I would disagree that@CrazyKeri, I know from playing fast fold on Partypoker that it is certainly doable to do 1k in a couple of hours just 2 tabling - sadly not the case even on blaze tables on Prima while it ran. Thankfully @Jon-PokerVIP is very understanding and you can tell him your situation and he will respond with a suitable compromise.

I totally agree with the argument that if people aren't up to it they shouldn't be in it. At the end of the day it is up to PokerVIP to set the requirements necessary for you to receive bankrolls from them each day and it is up to you to work out if you are up to it or not. However if you think the commitment is 2hrs/day you're simply incorrect and you will find yourself in difficult situations a couple of weeks/couple of months in like 90%< of the past stakees.

Feel free to critique anything I said here, would be interested to hear your opinions - especially those of past or current stakees.

Of course, I do understand that it likely adds up to more than 2 hours per day, as I said above, maybe it is more, but as you also stated, its a contract, one that people need to fulfill.

Don't get me wrong, I know exactly what it is like to have the pressure of being on the staking team, I was there for a while sometime ago. Back then it was 40k hands and that was much tougher, but 30k is doable. @FlyinPancake just proved my point entirely.

All @FlyinPancake proved is that he played 9431 hands on a certain weekend. Good job @FlyinPancake if you did that playing 4 tables only that's certainly an achievement. What site were you on, how many hours total did you play? The most I've ever done in a weekend was around 12k during a lockdown a few months back, I was playing 6 tables though.

I played around 5 or 6 hours Saturday night HitchHiking. Approx from midday to midnight Sunday with a huor or two for breaks thrown in for food etc. I wasnt attempting to goad or anything like that BTW. Just show a point that its easy to do. Obviously on work nights I cant do that due to family etc but 2K in a few hours each night makes the quota comfortably and with several nights off to boot.

Am on ACR.