The Case II

Two entries ago, I was considering the idea of attempting to earn 70,000 VPPs over the final two months of 2011. If you'd like, you can read the entire soliloquy here but basically I didn't like the idea of busting my ass 8-10 hours a day, everyday, for an extra $4/hr. One of my readers, an outstanding player in his own right, Alexander Carr, disagrees.

You're looking at this wrong imo, very wrong.

Sure, you are only adding $4.33/hr to your bottom line BUT (and this is huge) you are forcing yourself to play many many more hours of making what? $40/hr? $60/hr?

Let's say you are going to put in half the volume you would if you went for the 200k bonus (which I think is fair), you're looking at giving up probably 12k+ in playing PLUS the 2.6k bonus PLUS 122,500 vpps which is about $2k.

So I think you're giving up like 15k-20k by not going for that extra 2.6k bonus.

Well, umm, he's sort of right. If I didn't give this a shot, I'd probably play around 6,000 games over the next two months. And most would be 180s, where I earn very little VPPs. But to reach 70,000 I'd have to play an additional 6,000 games, all being 18 mans. My 18-man sample is large enough where I feel comfortable speculating about my true ROI, and at the moment I'm making roughly $2/game. Even if I dropped a bit below/ran poorly, I'd be still doing decently well.

6,000 games x $1/game = $6,000
6,000 games x $1.50/game = $9,000
6,000 games x $2/game = $12,000

Right there, that's $6-$12k in my pocket. Plus there's the matter of the bonuses. As I already mentioned, I get $2.6k for earning 70,000 more VPPs. And I'll have earned enough points (245,000) in that time to claim a $4k bonus as well. Suddenly, this doesn't seem like a bad idea.

One problem -- err, two problems. I'm out of town for the first week of November and a week in December, which means I have even less time to make this happen. 12,000 games in 6 weeks seems quite daunting, but I played 213 18s today in addition to 51 180s.

I still haven't decided what to do, but I'm leaning more towards giving it a go. In preparation, I'll be grinding 18s until my Norcal trip on the 28th. My goal is to play 1000 games (earning 6105 VPPs) and then I'll hopefully have a better idea of how difficult this task will be.