When speedrunning punch club there are a few important points in the timeline that are crucial to do at the earliest possible moment because they take a fixed amount of time to complete. You want to enter into the amateur league on day one as that is going to be the fastest way to get to phase 2 (going for the Russia storyline). After that you want to fight (and hopefully win) in the amateur league and get to the play-offs. There is randomness here in that you are ranked based on how many points the computer opponents have. If one of them wins all of their matches and gets a really high score it will take more fights for you to reach #1 and as far as I know there is no way to influence it. After that you have you have to stay in Russia for around 8 days (which is 4 fights waiting slightly more than 2 days between them). Next is phase 3 where you have to gain fame in order to fight through the different pro circuit fighters. During this time you want to use the least amount of days possible so your stats don't decay and you have the best chance of winning fights. Also using the marathon fights to gain fame / XP (experience points) is risky, but definitely worth it. I haven't worked out the math to specifically figure out what an optimal way to achieve enough fame for each fight is, so there is definitely some work to do there.

I decided upon going a bear build because the fights end quickly and you do not need as much XP as a turtle build does. I think turtle build needs the extra XP from the pizza and superhero side quests, which would slowdown the real time but not really affect the in game days.

• Detailed Walkthrough

Optimal initial abilities are kick and dodge, but they are not super important. A trick you can use during the forced fight with Bobo is you can open the menu and click surrender to die immediately instead of waiting to be destroyed saving some time. You can also do this during last fight with your brother as well as it doesn't matter who wins during that fight to end the game. I have noticed the surrender button will bug out some times and I think I associated that with starting a new game without turning off the game first, but I can't remember exactly. I opt for strong arms over the other two initial perks you could pick although there is some room for experimentation here. Another important time save is to eat all of the food in your house before leaving your house initially. Go to Mick, go to the gym, do not do the free fight as it gives you nothing, then do training.

Training with Silver gives you XP and can be done once a day. Handpad training gives you 2 XP and sparring gives you 3 XP if you win and 1 XP if you lose. It is important to maximize your XP early game so you want to start doing handpad training and switch over to sparring the first time you can reliably beat Silver, which is when you have around 4/4/4 stats and you get powerful uppercut.

It is important to use up your money in order to leverage the 3 free meals that Mick will give you as he won't feed you if you can afford to buy food. Enter the gym and get STR to 3.3ish and the rest into STM to unlock uppercut. You will want to reference http://punch-club.wikia.com/wiki/Exercise_machines to figure out the optimal way to train, but for the most part you will want bench press, treadmill, and speedbag. When those run out you will want to use the heavy bag depending on what you are trying to train. It is important when training to constantly cancel and restart it as you get a faster tick of stat gain from doing so and over the course of a run will add up to quite a bit of extra stat gain. I also ran experiments training until I exhausted a machine vs constantly switching to keep the bubble full and I didn't notice a significant difference (as stat gains are randomized already), so I don't bother avoiding exhausting a machine if that is the stat I am trying to train.

After training you can go to Mick to get the first free meal, then go work at the construction yard until you run out of energy. Then you can go handpad train with Silver, get uppercut, go buy meat, and then go to Mick for the second free meal. After that go home, sleep / eat and you should be able to fight the first match. You will want to work until day 4.25, and then go to the gym. If you timed it right, you should be able to unlock the ultimate fighting circuit. Now you want to train STR to 4 to get muscle memory and dump the rest into STM and AGI. After that you can handpad train to get enough for muscle memory and then go to Mick for the final free meal. Then you can go to start the ultimate fighting circuit. The first fight is easy enough, but the second one is really iffy until you get powerful uppercut.

Now the next big event is Roy will befriend you and take you to a bar. This will start the bar fights. You will want to take each fight at the bar as soon as you can because each fight happens two days after the last one. After 5 bar fights you will unlock the Bobo fight and this is the first big hurdle in the run. The skill tree I follow is to rush to side step, then work towards triple punch, and then unlock a skill slot to be able to equip it. Hopefully you can get to 6/6/6 and triple punch by the time you have to fight Bobo. There is a glitch after fighting Bobo where you talk to the bar fighter's brother to get the energy drink once, then you go get the hearing aid for Bobo and can talk to the brother again to get the energy drink again. This is critical as the energy drink makes it so you don't need to sleep anymore. Also after you get Bobo's hearing aid, agree to work for him and you get $100 every 3 days for no in game time.

After that you want to start focusing on getting STR to 8 for Muscle Memory II. All fights should be a joke now and you are at the mercy of the game's amateur ranking system to get you into the playoffs. It is important to only unlock ability slots when you have modifiers to put into them, you don't want to use more than one punch, so plan accordingly. You want to go for berzerker lategame but do not get ruthless aggression as that will lock you out of sidestep. After the play-offs its off to Russia!

When in Russia you will want to train to STR 13 in prep for getting Muscle Memory 3. Once you have that, dump the rest of the training time into AGI and STM. The fights in Russia are separated by 2 days so fight them ASAP. Also be careful about clicking, the game is buggy and sometimes you can move around while it is showing cutscenes and if you leave through a door or something it will soft lock the game sometimes.

After returning you will want to minimize your in game time to prevent stat decay and money becomes way easier to get, so you want to start paying for the bus to get everywhere if you are not already. Also you want to make sure to stock up on pizzas and energy drinks to get health / energy back between fights. You can kill the games process after losing a fight and it will not have saved so you can try the fight over. This doesn't work for the marathon fights. You should be 13/10/10 or so and you might want to risk going into the fights with that, but getting to 13/12/12 makes them way more consistent. After beating Kulk Kogan the end game sequence starts and you should surrender the fight to your brother immediately as you don't have to win. That is the end, Hooray!