I was concerned that people online were misunderstanding the idea of “endgame.” Sounds like I care too much about what people online think. I don’t really care that much. However, it is important when dealing with impressionable minds of men who will be going out and talking to girls to communicate clearly and encourage them to know what they want, such that they have a chance of getting it. Most people don’t know what they want.
Personally, I am interested in having a family, though there is no guarantee that it will happen for me. Yes, I could knock up a girl and reproduce, but I want to do more than that, I want to create a family and thrive.
That sounds like I’m pursuing an endgame get a wife, make a baby, the end. Game over.
Krauser wants a wife. Roosh wants a wife. Actually a lot of guys want a wife.
I agree with Magnum on this that there is no endgame. A wife and/or family is not the endgame. We all die alone. If you get into a relationship and that grows into a family, you still run the risk of a woman losing attraction for you and freeing herself from the situation in a way that an American lawyer gets paid (by you) to make painful and expensive (even if you’re not married – California laws are that bad). There is no end to that risk – you signed up for the relationship maintenance contract.
When Magnum says “So I’m at peace with being a player forever. As a man you have to be able to bring new women into your life on an ongoing basis, and pair-bond with them as you see fit.” this is certainly a valid option. And it seems to be a common interpretation of “No Endgame.”
However, I think it’s such an important topic, I wanted to share another perspective. My perspective.
Equilibrium is not “Men and Women are Equal!” Equilibrium is the balance between the male seduction and protection and the female submission and support. I’m not going to call it ying and yang, but I could.
If you are able to build a relationship with a rough equilibrium, then the amount of work needed to maintain the relationship is significantly reduced. Not going to call it easy mode because relationships are hard, but building it from an equilibrium is easier. How it starts is how it goes. You end up putting in about as much energy as you get out of it, give or take. No resentment builds, and you get the benefits of being in a relationship. Neither spouse is a drag upon the other. 1 + 1 can equal 3.
“What do I need to do to make her feel beautiful? What does she need to relax? What can’t she see about herself that would make her glow? What makes her feel sexy? What opens her heart? What fantasies does she need to explore? What does she need to feel to have the experience of a lifetime? What makes her melt? What does she need to feel such that she can shine for me? What does she need to feel so she can surrender to me… and really let herself “go?” What would the experience be that would make her more than eager to come back and do it all again?
And it is illustrative to cite a few quotes by a woman, Patricia Albere, from that same post describing how a woman knows or feels when equilibrium is and isn’t there:
“If he takes you someplace you want to go, then you can surrender to him. A lot of men don’t know where they are going. They’re not that attuned to you. They don’t necessarily care how it is for you, they are way too selfish. There is something that just doesn’t happen.” — Patricia Albere
“You can tell that a lot of times men just want what they want, and they want you to show up in a way that they can get off on the whole situation, and it’s not too much of a turn on for women. You kind of know if the man is actually really connected and wants something to happen for both of you.” — Patricia Albere
A woman in equilibrium is also exploring ways of supporting you, trusting you, surrendering and submitting to you, pleasing you, opening up to you, and taking care of you. She makes you sandwiches, so to speak.
Nash’s post goes deeper than I want to for purposes of this post, but it’s worth reading for a deeper understanding of seduction.
I’ve had 2 relationships built with equilibrium.
How does one build a relationship with equilibrium?
First, let me tell you a personal story to provide some context:
I did nightgame some years ago, and occasionally I would have an intense lover connection with a girl I met at a bar or a club, and occasionally I would experience a non-lover connection from a girl where she is interested in me for whatever reason, but the sex was more… …dutiful. The reasons women decide to have sex are all over the map.
I also tried some online game, and girls online seem to be sometimes looking for lovers or sometimes boyfriends and they are optimizing from among a wide selection of online men and probably aren’t even that happy with the results, and in NYC women will struggle with getting commitment from a guy. My experience with online dating was lackluster. I was able to meet and date and seduce girls but almost all of the sex was the sort of dutiful sex, a version of “keep you around because you are an interesting option” maintenance sex rather than the lover mode of “I desire you” sex.
My experience in daygame has provided me with almost exclusively lover sex from the girls I have met. The girls that make it through my filter really want me and want to please me and the sex is good. I work hard and approach a lot, but I’m happy with the results, and I see more improvement in my future.
That lover connection is the spark that creates conditions where equilibrium can happen.
Start with that connection as lovers, she is really attracted to you and has raw sexual desire for you. That can happen superficially and it is called limerence, but at least in my mind’s eye, I’m talking more about a deeper level of seduction (level 3), where the man makes her shine and protects her, and she supports and pleases him.
So anyway, you start off as lovers in a deep level of seduction. You enjoy her, your psychologies and social class backgrounds are matched enough that you don’t find each other annoying (or mismatched enough that you find each other exotic), and maybe even enjoy talking and spending significant time together or your love languages match well. If the things you want in life are similar (babies being the biggest one usually), you have an approximate equilibrium. The man can choose to commit to the woman (who, not always, but usually hopes to convert him from a lover into a lover and a provider – the big score) and even get married and/or make a baby.
This here is the point that a number of guys might consider endgame, but it’s actually just a (possibly temporary) equilibrium.
One can also get married and make a baby without being in equilibrium. Sometimes people figure it out and grow together and sometimes they don’t and/or they grow apart. You can imagine how it plays out.
Equilibrium can break down if it’s not maintained. It can happen in many different ways: some guys relax and play video games now that they don’t have to spend time chasing girls and are getting regular (perhaps just dutiful) sex from a girl they like enough and who puts up with them. Or he loses his job and she resents him while she works to keep the household afloat. Or she gets fat from eating her feelings and he loses attraction for her.
Equilibrium requires work. The guy is not free from the responsibility of leading and staying attractive as best they can, or even being a good father if they have kids. That’s another side of “there is no endgame.” You don’t get to rest. You might get to rest when you are dead – but I’m not even certain about that.
Women have responsibilities too, they should remain attractive as best they can (despite time and nature and gravity working against them), they should be supportive, and may have significant responsibilities as a mother. They shoulder some of the responsibility for maintaining equilibrium, but even at their most equal, it’s still probably at least 51% the man’s responsibility to maintain this equilibrium.
So back to Magnum, when he says he is “at peace with being a player forever.” He’s expressing that he can get close enough to achieving that equilibrium on his terms and doesn’t have to lock it in with exclusivity or marriage. He can have relationships for the timeframes and intimacy level he wants. He has the skills to make that happen, so it’s a good choice for him, until he changes his mind and wants something else.
It’s possible to maintain the equilibrium and have a family without locking it in with exclusivity and marriage. However, society isn’t there yet, and there are many cringeworthy examples of attempts to do so provided by new age communes and fringe religious groups around the world.
Yes, the legal system discriminates against men in marriage. Most men are not able to choose beforehand the jurisdiction their marriage would be litigated in in the event of a divorce (divorce laws in all 50 states of the US all vary, as do countries in the world), and even if they could, judges can throw it out. So yeah, there is significant risk of marriage. That’s not news. However, starting in equilibrium and putting in the work to maintain that equilibrium helps manage that risk – and gives you a fair shot. If you have some basic game and frame control, go to the gym and take care of your health, have a mission or even just a job, you’re probably going to do better than most guys and have a lower (but not zero!) chance of divorce, and if you do get divorced, you have the skills to start over again. Your odds are better than the even odds of divorce statistics, but it is not riskless.
For me, there is no endgame either. I am looking for an equilibrium to create a family and I think it may make sense to lean on the traditional structure that society provides (an example being a marriage in a jurisdiction that is not as dysfunctional as the United States or Anglo countries), but I also recognize the responsibility that I will have to maintain that equilibrium possibly until I am dead. That’s my interpretation of “No Endgame.” Maybe I won’t find it. Maybe I will one day come to a realization similar to what Magnum has realized about himself. We’ll see.
In a famous historical myth, The Odyssey, Homer tells stories of a great hero Odysseus (also known as Ulysses) sailing home from his journey home after the Trojan war.
On his journey home he encountered the sirens. Beautiful women with golden hair who would sing songs to sailors, and lure them to crash upon their rocks. Lure is the word often used, and I think it’s slightly unfair to call it luring.
Odysseus gets a warning from the goddess Circe:
First you will come to the Sirens who enchant all who come near them. If any one unwarily draws in too close and hears the singing of the Sirens, his wife and children will never welcome him home again, for they sit in a green field and warble him to death with the sweetness of their song.
There is a great heap of dead men’s bones lying all around, with the flesh still rotting off them. Therefore pass these Sirens by, and stop your men’s ears with wax that none of them may hear; but if you like you can listen yourself, for you may get the men to bind you as you stand upright on a cross-piece half way up the mast, and they must lash the rope’s ends to the mast itself, that you may have the pleasure of listening. If you beg and pray the men to unloose you, then they must bind you faster.
Samuel Butler’s translation of The Odyssey, Book XII, online via MIT.
And his description of the actual island of the sirens:
They sit beside the ocean, combing their long golden hair and singing to passing sailors. But anyone who hears their song is bewitched by its sweetness, and they are drawn to that island like iron to a magnet. And their ship smashes upon rocks as sharp as spears. And those sailors join the many victims of the Sirens in a meadow filled with skeletons.
Samuel Butler’s translation of The Odyssey, Book XII, online via MIT.
And the summary of how Odysseus handles it:
When he hears the words and the music, the song enchants Odysseus’ heart. He longs to plunge into the waves and to swim to the island. He wants to embrace the Sirens.
He strains against the bonds which hold him to the ship’s mast. He strains so hard that the bonds cut deeply into the flesh of his back and arms.
Nodding and scowling at his ear-plugged men, he urges them to free him. Expecting this reaction, the men row harder and harder with their oars.
To Odysseus, who is bewitched by the song, the Sirens look as beautiful as Helen of Troy [the most beautiful woman in the world]. To his crew, made deaf with beeswax, the Sirens seem like hungry monsters with vicious, crooked claws.
The ship speeds forward and soon the song of the Sirens is an echo of an echo. Only then do the crew members stop rowing and unplug their ears.
While Odysseus’s crew takes care of him like a band of brothers trying to protect one of their own from marrying a girl of whom they don’t approve. The story has value at that superficial level, that to one man, a woman will be Helen of Troy, but his friends may see her as a monster.
To guys who have been hurt or resentful (many shades of this exist in the male online communities and however people identify their belief systems these days) this can sound like all women are monsters and men have to protect each other from them, never get married, etc. And that is one lesson men could take away from this ancient story. However, that is purely defensive and there is a much deeper lesson that is being missed.
Odysseus was a seafarer. He was on a journey. He was on his way home to his wife and children after fighting in a war he didn’t really want to fight. He was on a larger mission, and his ship was sailing on a course that was in line with that mission. The sirens are trying to distract the set course of the ship, just a little bit, but that small distraction can take the ship off course, put it at risk of crashing on rocks, and increase the chances of the greater mission never being achieved.
Ulysses and the Sirens by J. W. Waterhouse (in a gallery in Melbourne)
Women are sirens. They can appear to be both beautiful enchanting pixies and ravenous monsters. Sometimes a man will see both sides of her, sometimes two men will each see a different side of her.
Sirens can offer the best elements of femininity, beautiful music and energy and muse-like qualities that inspire us as men to do great things and make us feel good while doing them.
However, all sirens have a monstrous side, and some sirens are more monstrous than others. Since sirens is almost always a plural, there are individuals and with that comes some variance, so there is a spectrum of behavior among the sirens. Some have been wounded by men in their lives and want men to crash on the rocks and laugh while they drown or are smashed on the rocks (exemplified in the man hating feminist archetype) while many others are bored, chaotic, clumsy or even naive and innocently good natured – but they all want to sing their songs and get attention from the sailors.
The attention given to the sirens by sailors comes at a cost to the sailor, as he could make mistakes in maintaining their course. And a great woe to the sailor who changes course to approach the sirens directly.
Resisting the Sirens call is actually a fantastic analog for maintaining frame with women. To be explicit, for readers who don’t like nuance, the siren’s call is the female frame, and we can extract lessons from the thousand year old myth that will help us today. Human sexuality hasn’t changed THAT much.
What did Odysseus do?
Odysseus didn’t have a direct way to fight back against the sirens. He set a strong disciplined course and provided failsafe instructions to make his way through it.
The Odysseus approach is to just sail his set course, songs be damned. It’s effective. He notes the sirens frame and is able to both enjoy it and be tormented as he is tempted by it and hurts himself straining against his bonds, but ultimately makes it through. Brute force. If you don’t have the natural ability or opportunity to develop skill with women, or the discipline to withstand the temptations of the siren, this is a safe tactic.
Daygame and the Siren’s Call
Daygamers are like the men who sail frequently by the island of the sirens. We have experienced the Siren’s Call first hand and lived to tell the tale. We have survived crashes when sirens have distracted us, and most of us can tell a tale (or ten!) of changing the course of our ship and how we crashed on the rocks. We regale drunken sailors in the ports with tales of their beauty and warnings of their treachery.
We haven’t seen all of the tactics of all sirens, but each of us gains unique reference experiences with each approach, text, date, or interaction. We also have a community of experienced sailors (and numerous wannabe sailors who dream of sailing one day). As the salty sailors, seasoned men, old sea dogs, and occasional cabin boy share reference experiences, patterns emerge over time. Knowledge is shared, tactics are developed, new experiences are sought out and men challenge themselves and become better men.
Warnings of a Salty Sailor or How NOT to Handle Sirens:
Attention is everything. Some of the sirens will actively try and lure sailors to ruin, while others just want a sailor to wave back at them. If the sailor is on a good course with strong winds and currents, it’s not too harmful to wave back. If the sailor is concentrating in the middle of a hurricane, it can cost everything.
The dead sailor approach is to drop everything and set a fast course directly for the island, where the reef will break the hull of his ship and the sailor will die or become a castaway, like so many before him. He accepted the frame of the siren and pays the ultimate price. This strategy we can see all too often with the simps and men who click like on every social media share of some girl they are focused on.
There are also men who are amazingly resilient in their denial and can cling to rocks and survive on a narrow and rocky deserted beach known as the “friendzone.” Some say it is a fate worse than death. In seafarer terms these men are appropriately termed “castaways” and some may have even been marooned. In the Tom Hanks movie Castaway, (SPOILER ALERT) his fiancé doesn’t wait around for him, and he develops an inscrutable bro code with a volleyball named Wilson. It is difficult for castaway men to get on a ship, let alone set it on a course, but this is what they must do.
As their songs age, many sailors may have heard a siren’s particular melody or one like it, and some sailors can even sing it from memory. The aging siren’s behaviors become more volatile: chasing ships, singing louder, demanding passage and course correction from sailors that may or may not care. While these aging sirens may move to more approachable islands with less dangerous rocks (no guarantee they will), or perhaps pluck a castaway from the rocky beach of the “friendzone,” the experienced sailors have the luxury of ignoring them. The inexperienced sailors may take the risk and pick up a siren and maybe it works out or maybe their life is even worse than if they had crashed on the rocks.
Some men have a fantasy of living on the island with the sirens. The island where a man can enjoy the songs of many sirens at once, a fabled pussy paradise. One possible outcome is that the sirens would fight over such a man and he would be torn to pieces, as in this common TV trope. I don’t know if it’s a myth or not. If it exists in reality, such an island might look like this. I don’t know or care to speculate beyond that suggestion; I don’t have much experience with that world.
There is also a fantasy island of pornography. Thirsty landlubbers can watch video recordings of sirens doing everything imaginable and singing all sorts of songs without having to sail anywhere. Weak sauce.
Example Melodies of the Siren’s Call
Typically the first siren’s call a sailor hears starts off like this: an actually hot girl gets pedestalized by the sailor, and he crashes on the rocks. She might not even notice. Or perhaps she’s seen it before, but may not have connected the dots to realize it has anything to do with her. “I was just sitting here, combing my hair and singing my song, and that man over there crashed on the rocks. Then that man as well, and that one too. How peculiar!” A slightly more self-aware siren may realize the effect she has on men, and yet, even if she does realize it, she may not care. Some may take it a step further and actively try and cause men to crash on the rocks. If this were not a mythic tale, it would be manslaughter.
The siren can notice a sailor is not immune to her song and can change her tune if she wants to get something from him (perhaps when she shifts toward wanting a provider). Sirens do not respect men who are distracted so easily by their song. They may settle for it, because they are getting something out of the deal, but they do so resentfully.
The thirst trap rap or beta bait beatboxing: The siren sends a sexy photo over text, or brings up very sexual topics relatively early in a conversation. It could be a part of the siren’s song, but it could also be a trap, which can cause a sailor to crash on the rocks. Sometimes this happens when she is returning to the island and her song is more melodic than normal due to her emotional turmoil from being dumped by a ship, or any other sort of emotional turmoil.
The melody of penpals or tune of texting to nowhere: The sailor gets the number of a siren and the text conversation stops abruptly for reasons unknown. Perhaps she begins singing for others, just wanted to see if the sailor would change his course, grows bored of watching the sailor sail his boat by her island, loses interest now that the sailor is sailing toward the island, left on another ship with another sailor and didn’t say goodbye, or the sailor might have gotten stuck in a dead spot with no wind and the conversation continues for weeks, months, years without meeting the siren. The sailor has no control over the song of the siren, it can stop at any time. It happens. Just have to go talk to more girls.
The sad sad song of woe: A siren can sing a sad song and can cry and play to the sailor’s emotions to get him to comply with her wishes. A recent personal example is that a (Russian) girl told me she quit her job but immediately clarified that they would take her back, to try and get me to cave and give her whatever it was that she wanted. I believe she said that to test my frame (I’m certain she “quit” Wednesday and then went back to work on Thursday) and I just sailed on by her island and left her there. Haven’t spoken to her since, but occasionally as I would scroll down in my messages on WhatsApp, I did notice that I would be blocked and other times unblocked. I don’t care. It may sound cold without the full context, but it was 100% the right move.
The social media song: “Follow me on Innnn – staaaaaa – grammmmm!” she croons. Following a siren and liking her photos on social media seems harmless enough, but it is distracting the sailor from their mission. Following her stories and clicking acknowledgment buttons and writing comments is like waving back to the siren. She likely notices it in aggregate (that whole aircraft carrier of sailors is waving at me), and notices when no boats are sailing by, but little in between. How much time do sailors spend on instagram instead of sailing toward their goals? It is a slightly different story if the sailor is being followed by the siren, and perhaps she notices your absence on the aircraft carrier of sailors waving at her, and maybe calls out for you directly when she doesn’t see you. That’s a good sign and is discussed later.
The help me song: The siren wants help with her homework. Financial assistance. Help moving or assembling furniture. Travel buddies. (Note this would be different than her qualifying herself, for example a girl who wanted my opinion on how her food tastes – which wouldn’t happen in NYC – no girls can cook here). Anyway, I have encountered a very specific version of this song a number of times: I usually attract smart girls, which for whatever reason means they were told to go to school and study something useless more often than not. It used to be called a Mrs. Degree, now in the USA it would be considered a student debt dowry. The siren’s final paper (which for European sirens always seems to be in English) has some mistakes that need to be corrected so she can graduate. And it’s due tomorrow! That song is lame.
The sail this waysong: The siren attempts to lead the sailor. Common example that has happened to me: on a date the siren asks you to move to a different spot: “Please sail your boat over to these rocks here, sailor. It’s perfectly safe and you can appreciate me better.” Just plain old fashioned frame stealing.
The ditty of disinterest: Sometimes the siren will sing a brief tune to get rid of a sailor. She is polite and either not interested (gives you her number and says “text me!” but will never respond) or perhaps she is afraid of you (some sailors are privateers or pirates and have cannons on their boat) or thinks you can’t handle rejection and tells tales of another sailor (“I have a boyfriend”) who may or may not exist.
The Hidden Sirens Among Us:
Girls with Boyfriends
Sometimes a girl is in a relationship and she doesn’t tell you when you approach. It happens to me regularly. You get her number and she even comes out. Eventually you find out about the boyfriend somehow.
This girl is a siren, but not on a cliff with rocks. She’s a siren already on some other dude’s ship. She’s still got her siren tricks, and since she’s already on a ship. It’s easy for her to wave over to another sailor’s ship, or sing and distract him from his course and mission. If the sailor gets off course, if his ship accidentally collides with her boyfriend’s ship, it’s the sailor’s fault, not hers. The siren doesn’t have any skin in the game, she’s on a ship one way or another. Her boyfriend will probably get mad at the sailor for hitting his ship, not necessarily at her. He might even attack the sailor or try and sink his ship. Best avoid these sirens, for they are time wasters.
If her boyfriend is a solid seafarer, perhaps he keeps her in line and keeps her busy on the ship, she doesn’t have time to wave or sing for other passing ships, and he might even see other sailors coming and keep himself and his siren safely out of their way. It’s not about mate guarding, it’s about safety on the sea. The sea is an unforgiving force of nature that will unapologetically weed your genes out of existence, and the sea will be respected.
The Beauty of Sirens
Going deep into the rabbit hole, things can get pretty dark. These innocent sailors are just trying to stay on course and these awful sirens are distracting them and causing so much trouble. Nietzsche reminded us to take a breath:
He who fights with monsters should be careful lest he thereby become a monster. And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee.
-Nietzsche in Good and Evil. 146
Repeating what was said earlier: Sirens can offer the best elements of femininity, beautiful music and energy and muse-like qualities that inspire us as men to do great things and make us feel good while doing them.
Girls are beautiful. Feminine energy is fantastic. Sex is fun and feels good and makes babies. Sirens have a beautiful side and can sing beautiful melodies.
So a sailor might want to take a siren along on his ship and enjoy them as muses for support, comfort, inspiration and entertainment on his journey. She gets something delightful out of it too, she gets off the island and goes on an adventure under his leadership and protection. He may take her along on all his voyages forever. She may jump ship and leave. She may sink his ship. He may maroon her on an island. Anything can happen. But, for at least a time, the sailor may know some joy and enjoy the song of the siren.
How does a sailor know when he might be able to capture a siren?
What the sailor should be looking for is the siren that flies off the rocks and comes to sing for him on his ship.
She wants her song to help him and inspire new voyages in support of his mission and sign up as a first mate or a stowaway or in whatever capacity he will accept her, despite the old sailor maxim that it is bad luck to have a woman on board a ship.
An experienced sailor may have listened to a number of siren songs and may recognize different qualities in a siren song that others don’t notice. He may appreciate things other sailors don’t. He can decide for himself which song he like best and might like to take along on his voyages and journeys.
A sailor should really only want to choose a siren that is making his life better: he likes her song, she’s investing in him and supporting his vision and accepting his leadership. She’s submitting to him. To the sailors reading this, you are leading or going somewhere or doing something with your life, right?
As I said above, the siren is getting something out of it. She gets off the island and goes on an adventure under his leadership and protection.
Siren Catching
As mentioned before, perhaps she noticed a particular sailor’s absence despite an aircraft carrier of sailors waving at her, and maybe calls out for him directly when she doesn’t see him. She wants to be caught. She sends him walls of text and reaches out. She makes an effort and invests.
If a siren lands on his boat, a sailor’s first instinct should be to push her off. Push is a good first step. If she wants to be on his boat, she’ll get back on, likely with something to prove.
A sailor should also test sirens that land on his boat by escalating to determine if she actually likes him or if she is just distracting him because she’s bored on the island of the sirens. For example, if you escalate in a situation with a girl, let’s say by trying to kiss her, you will find out very quickly if she likes you or maybe she suddenly has to go (or reveals a boyfriend). Maybe your escalation is too fast, but now she knows where to go when she decides she’s ready for it. There’s a lot of nuance to escalation (speed and calibration and two steps forward one step back) but the main idea is well summarized in a rhyme by a Young MC:
If the sailor is not ready to take on a siren, some say he should sail on and seek his fortune. Others may tell him to come back when he has more experience with sirens. Or as a distraction from the missions of the broader world, the sailor could go to an island within range of the sirens to study them and listen to their songs. However the sailor may not learn that much, for on that island there are plenty of hopeless guys, involuntarily celibate men who are driven mad by the sirens call.
Catching a siren is still fraught with peril. Once a sailor has trapped a siren, and has convinced himself that her song is the most beautiful, he may try to sail off with the siren too soon, before he has cleared the rocks; the sailor may try to push for a relationship too soon. While this may work occasionally, he is a foolish sailor for taking that additional risk. If he crashes, he is likely to die on the rocks and become another victim of the sirens. In my opinion, this is why the use of the word “lure” in the myth isn’t quite right, it’s more that a siren encourages a man’s eagerness and foolishness. It’s not really her fault. Oops she did it again.
When a sailor has a siren aboard his boat, she has submitted to him, and he does have the power to keelhaul her (she might like it rough), or make her walk the plank or maroon her. He can make mistakes by not keeping her busy enough, guiding her or taking proper responsibility for her. If the siren is forced off the boat, or if her position on the boat becomes unstable enough she may leave, she will be weakened and will go back to the rocks, or jump to another ship. The sailor may see the monstrous side of her as she departs.
Last bit of advice from mythology for sailors: Don’t date a girl named Medusa. I hear she uses all the online dating apps.
Do daygame to learn about sirens and their many calls. You might actually learn to sail too.
I’ve been thinking about trusted networks recently.
Daygame is risky in the #metoo era – some women can have a bad reaction to your approach if they don’t find you attractive or are just having a bad day or for any number of reasons beyond your control, but which are still 100% your fault for engaging her feminine chaos. Fear of chaos is the root of approach anxiety. It is overcome by self-confidence that you can handle that chaos. Girls cannot articulate that, but they respect it.
For me it has been approximately 1/1000 approaches where a girl was visibly upset by my approach. Before whatever random feminist finds this blog says “That’s one woman too many!” it should be noted that I took some verbal abuse from those women on the spot, and stood like a tree trunk. Then BOTH of them apologized to me. One apologized about 2 seconds later and the other said “if it makes you feel any better, I have a boyfriend.” It didn’t make me feel any better, I waived her off as her momentum had been killed and she was just standing around after going off on me and backpedaling and then didn’t know what to do next. I didn’t care and was ready to go onto the next approach.
Anyway, things get dangerous when white knights step into the picture – guys trying to be chivalrous in front of the girls and “protect” them in hopes of getting laid. What those guys are missing is that those behaviors were originally intended to impress a girl’s parents, not the girl. Girls didn’t evolve to appreciate white knight behaviors until it was their own daughter they were auctioning off to the most eligible knight. Romeo was not the white knight that the Capulets had selected for Juliet in fair Verona.
A good old fashioned mob from twitter starts with a few ragey cagey feminists, often a journalist or two, and then some white knights pile on in hopes of getting noticed. They have no qualms about doxing and harassing people, attacking their livelihoods openly and directly, so it’s not unwise to be anonymous.
Some guys have to shed their anonymity to promote their content, and I guess that’s OK. Others do it for authenticity – and while that’s respectable, it does limit you to the Overton window somewhat, and cause future risk to your career if the Overton window shifts. It’s a commitment to a viewpoint that can fall out of favor. Life is long and people will dig through your old twitter for the strangest reasons.
Anyway, those of us with jobs that would be considered more traditional careers in NYC mask ourselves and operate while sharing daylight with white knights, betas with girlfriends that chose them and never had reason to question anything, harmless gay dudes, feral urban women, and of course the woke NYU journalism majors (if you meet a girl from NYU journalism is a safe guess). Any one of them can blow your cover and start a mob against you, trying to dox you, call your employer and get you fired for being a mysogonyst or whatever darker slurs they can come up with. I’m not super afraid of being doxxed, I think I could handle it, but there would be an opportunity cost of distracting me from the stuff I want to do – dealing with vitriol from people I don’t care about is a waste of time. I don’t write for them. I write to find others that belong in the trusted network.
Trusted networks are important. When you get into game – you usually start meeting guys from some online group or lair as it was called by Neil Strauss in “The Game,” and the guys in any given group are all over the map. A regular ragtag group of misfits that would never be put in a Disney movie to succeed against all odds. I’ve found that maybe 1 in 10 is actually worth maintaining contact with despite whatever personality flaws they may have (and they all do, I do too). The best filter I have come up with is to only connect with people who I’ve seen approach. A number of guys just want to hang out and talk about getting girls but not actually approach. Strangely, they also like to talk online, and consider getting a number to be a big fucking deal. It’s almost like they hope that by hanging out with you, something rubs off on them but they don’t want to do any work. When I meet a new daygamer on the street (usually they approach me), I used to like to watch them approach a few times before exchanging numbers – I didn’t realize how common it is for people to read a little bit about daygame and claim to be good at it, and then they are terrified to run up to a 6.5 and tell her she has interesting shoes to even warm up. It’s unfortunate how effective this filter is, but it works.
Thank you ladies for being the filter that helps us men test other men. We appreciate it.
To a beginner it may sound heartless:
“Runner – you were a beginner once too! Didn’t anyone take a chance on you?”
No, actually. I did daygame alone for the better part of a year. I knew Nash from doing nightgame, and he started doing daygame when I was originally going to learn daygame (but then I got a girlfriend). Since he lived in a different city and was ahead of me on the daygame learning curve, my only companion was a What’sApp chat with him where I recorded a note for each approach I did. It was just enough of a dopamine hit to keep me going.
After a few months of doing daygame, I met Cova at a lair meetup and he was probably the best daygamer I knew of at the time in NYC, and he asked me how long I had been daygaming. I was only a few months in and I think I had gone on my first date from daygame at the time or was just about to, and he just sort of disappeared and ignored me. 8 months later we met up to do some approaching and he didn’t remember me, and encouraged me to approach a girl in a store, and I ended up seducing her on the first date and dating her for a month or so. Cova is a bit of a dick, the kind of guy that gets a charge out of approaching a girl you want to approach (bad form for a wingman), but he made me earn the right to be a wing, and that was the right challenge for me, and probably for him as well. We still hang out from time to time, and he challenges me a little and I respect him for it.
Sometime last year, I was approached by a fellow I call Blackbeard (he does not have an online identity but he reads Twitter and blogs) one day after I did an approach in Union Square. We talked a little bit and I watched him do some approaches. He had only read Roosh and watched some Torero, and was approaching girls by walking ahead of them and then turning back at a 45 degree angle, not front stopping (that was the first correction). He needed a lot of work, but he did the work. He approaches even more than I do. I suggested he take an improv course and be transparent with the instructors, telling them that he wants to be more expressive. He’s made tremendous progress, and he’s young too, so he’s going to have an interesting life. I’m proud of him, and I trust him.
So a guy that approaches girls can be trustworthy. Are all guys that approach girls trustworthy? No. Are all guys that don’t approach girls untrustworthy? No. Are guys that talk a big game about approaching girls and then don’t untrustworthy? I think so, until proven otherwise. They need to grow up.
However when we have this anonymous network of guys who have developed the skill of approaching women, and we are prevented from sharing openly due to hostility and threats of persecution, trust is important. Approaching is hard to fake. Girls know it and guys who approach know it. It’s a good basic filter.
I’ve updated my blog template to be both more readable, and also to include a sidebar of people that I have met in daygame that I trust – guys that actually approach, and have taught me things and that I have met in person.
People who are doing events will monitor newcomers for negative and positive traits and guys […] who can’t handle it will not be invited into the higher tiers of things.
…and this applies to daygame as well. Some guy lied about his skill level to Mr.V and met up with him and later that day me and Cova joined them in Soho in NYC. He was dressed poorly, telling us who to approach (“I’m spotting targets for you guys!”), clearly had not done more than 10 approaches but had read a blog once about daygame. I think after that Mr.V said to me his new policy is “no new friends.”
However, I encountered Breeze (who opened a girl I was about to open) and then proceeded to get her number. I didn’t approach him, but I made a mental note of what he looked like, and then a week later he lost a girl to Mr.V (Crayon), but came and approached him afterward and I recognized him from earlier. He was like “Oh I follow Runner, Nash, RoyWalker” and it was amusing to meet him that way. He had such a good vibe and I had already seen him approach, so it wasn’t long before he was added to the trusted network.
There have also been questions about some people’s true stats recently – and some people claiming to do daygame but also mixing in night game, gutter game, online game, and there are rumors of even some guys using seeking arrangement and calling it game. I guess I’m more of a daygame purist at this point (having done nightgame and online game before deciding to do daygame). I’m not a fan of online game, and I openly look down on seeking arrangement. If it helps them achieve their goals, then OK, but as soon as people start to make claims about their stats it affects their credibility. Egos are funny things, and sometimes people need to pump their stats to feel good about themselves or to tell themselves they are better than others. There is no surer sign that someone is unimportant and should be ignored. This is why we can’t have nice things. There is a lot of this kind of fronting on twitter – selling courses, e-books, and building followers, and people will sometimes take this fakery at face value. Some might say they do damage to the community – teaching vulnerable young guys the wrong lessons and making them even more bitter when results don’t appear. That may be true. However, the trusted network roots out these kind of behaviors quickly and ruthlessly, and appropriately, the fake people tend fizzle out over time:
You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.
Naturally, the fake guys are quietly excluded from the trusted network.
In German there is a word männerbund, which can be translated as ‘male bond’ or possibly ‘masculine society’ (according to some guy on reddit), but I like to think of it as a male social hierarchy where guys are strongly collaborative with each other – the best example would be a group of guys in a military unit – they depend on each other in life and death situations and that forms a bond that can (and usually does) last for life.
As daygamers, we are doing guerrilla warfare against silly social rules put in place by Hollywood and listening logically to girls talk about how they want a man to approach them (they know it when they feel it but the female ability to actually articulate it properly is ultra rare – yet every girl thinks she is that ultra rare girl that can articulate it and it must be true for all women – the paradox of solipsism). This guerrilla warfare bonds us daygamers together like a military unit. We can’t talk about it openly, but we have to execute to get results.
Sports teams are a proxy for this, which reminds me of one of my favorite twitter aphorisms recently:
Some of you didn’t play sports growing up and it shows.
-Many Retweets on Twitter, no idea on the original source
Daygame wings can’t do the work for you, and with a nod to my running sport background, it’s not a team relay either. It’s a solo sport and winging is just about vibe maintenance and keeping each others vibe warm between approaches. Keeping morale up between waves of rejection. However, when you have a trusted network, you get more than that. You get genuine encouragement to keep going. Others get excited for your successes and you get excited for theirs. You step out and even though you are alone, you feel like they have your back. Your wings are with you in spirit. You belong. You’re in the tribe, absorbing the knowledge of the tribe, helping to advance the tribe. This is a good thing. Trusted networks are the real value of daygame.
In a trusted network, higher level opportunities become possible. Depending on who is in your network, you can get access to social circles, employment opportunities, mentoring, and business deals because people trust you and like you. In my opinion, this is way more valuable than selling your ebook on how to approach girls for $17, but maybe that’s because I have a good network.
To get in the trusted network you have to go through the trials of women. Getting over approach anxiety. Getting in good enough shape and dressing well enough to have a chance. Improving your frame and learning to lead and seduce. Managing to keep a good vibe throughout all the ups and downs, and numerous other self improvements that are different for each man. Become a high value guy and join the club.
Daygame is Freedom or What’s Wrong with Online Game
Lately I consider myself something of a daygame purist. I just want to do daygame and avoid nightgame and online game because I don’t enjoy them or think they are a good use of my time.
I’ve done nightgame, I’ve done online game, I’ve had my longest relationship with a girl from my social circle, and I’ve spent the last few years doing daygame. Daygame is my favorite, it has made me a better man and I am approaching satisfaction with the quality and results I am getting from it.
Years ago, I remember when I first read “The Game” and went out to some bars and clubs during the next few weekends, did some approaches, and made out with a nice blonde nurse. I thought I had solved women. She texted me back once and then ghosted me. Oops.
Then there was a period of time where I was going out to nightgame 7 days a week. I was dating some pretty awesome girls that I met at bars and clubs. There were 2 girls I met during this time that I dated for a few months, and looking back, they were pretty great girls and if I was more mature, maybe they would be my wife right now. Instead I wanted to go out and experience the excitement of nightlife. The possibility of more and/or higher quality experiences made those options less attractive. I had some really good nights and weeks even where I was getting the signals that I was ‘top guy.’ Brief episodes, but it was something. Eventually I got tired of going out, drinking, talking to girls – it became a chore. I just didn’t enjoy night game anymore.
My longest relationship was a girl I met through my social circle. We started talking about a topic and she was fascinated by me and pursued me. There was a jealousy plotline during the seduction and everything. I broke up with her because she didn’t ever want kids (which to me was a dealbreaker) and I was moving to New York – a city filled with beautiful women, so I was thinking “I’ll just find another one.” Again, the the possibility of more experiences or ‘getting a better relationship deal’ made that relationship option less attractive.
New York City is a more competitive dating environment that where I was coming from, so I spent a bit of time regretting breaking up with my ex-girlfriend – she’s smoking hot and was really into me. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if she came with me and I was somehow able to convince her to have kids – too late now, she’s gone and married another guy, someone she can not have kids with.
However, shortly after my arrival in New York City I thought Tinder was amazing. Then they (Tinder) kept dicking around with the algorithms and extorting money from men, the women became flakier and flakier, more Venmo and IG handles appearing in their profiles. At some point it stopped working for me – I had months long dry spells, and occasionally got lucky, but I felt like I was at the mercy of the algorithm. I never felt like the possibility of more and/or higher quality experiences was in my power, online game felt like some sort of degenerate gamble – gamble is the right word because of the unknown algorithmic nature behind how people are displayed and how randomly they would match with you, and what are the odds of it being a bot. Hope is not a strategy. No one is coming to save you.
So being the renegade that I am, I started doing daygame. It was hard at first, but I felt backed into a corner by online game and my heart wasn’t in nightgame anymore. The demons were telling me that daygame was my only option. The only way out is through.
I think I got lucky my first month, I started in August and fashion week in NYC happens in early September each year. I got a number from a 19 year old fashion model that “Vogue” magazine called the “it” girl of the year. I teased her about something relating to robots taking over the world and she laughed and I got her number. I texted her and she gave me a reply – a single laughing emoji, and then I never heard from her again. However, it was just the mere hint of a top guy signal, a flake of gold proving out the mine, and that convinced me I was on the right track. Quality seemed obtainable and within my reach now. I redoubled my efforts.
You can read some of my other posts for how long it took me to brute force the learning curve for daygame (spoiler: it was an average of 5 approaches a day for a few years), and fast forward to the present day where I am dating two girls I met on the street 6-8 weeks ago. I am still going out and approaching because of the possibility of more and/or higher quality experiences. Consistently approaching also helps episodes of being ‘top guy’ last for months at a time. I’m looking for a girl that makes me not want to go out and approach other girls, i.e. she compares favorably to going out and approaching. Perhaps such a superb woman does not exist. Perhaps we as men always want some new strange. If so, I may never stop searching for her. I owe it to myself to try anyway. Daygame makes that possible.
Subsequently, as I have gotten better at daygame, a local NYC daygamer @covadg regularly tries to drag me out to some bar or club for some nightgame. I have gone several times, and each time I have been disappointed with the quality of girls in bars. I’d rather be out on the street. The possibility of more and/or higher quality experiences makes the girls in the bar/club less attractive than what I can meet on the street. I just didn’t feel like it was a good use of my time.
Daygame gives you immediate feedback and has a tight feedback loop. You learn a lot in just a few minutes of conversation with a girl you are attracted to – it is good for quality, and you may encounter quantity during the process too. If you slum it in daygame, and date a girl below the standard of what you want, the street will compare favorably and you will go back out and approach and improve naturally.
Nightgame has similarly immediate feedback, and you can seduce faster (same night), but the quality is often lower. Fine if you want to put numbers up on the board, but quantity is not quality. It is possible to slum it for a night or for a short period of time. The repetition of going to the bar/club and accepting the limitations of the environment can cause a pattern of slumming it and prevent you from improving.
Quantity has a quality all its own.
Joseph Stalin (discussing Russian soldiers vs German troops in WWII)
Online game is so passive and algorithmic based, the girls are liking or rejecting you initially based on your picture and a blurb of text.
You can get some quantity and maybe quality online, but you have no control over how much or how often. It’s a degenerate gamble. You have no guarantee of more experiences or higher quality experiences if you continue. Online can also breed laziness and I know a number of guys who are most definitely slumming it by taking whatever they are given by the great algorithmic matching engine, and that is why they don’t improve.
The feedback is arbitrary and the display of potential matches is controlled by an algorithm. It’s tyranny.
Definition of Tyranny: Cruel, unreasonable, or arbitrary use of power or control.
I’m an American. Our forefathers didn’t accept tyranny. They took action and started a war with England over a 2% tax and declared independence shortly thereafter:
Don’t accept tyranny. Daygame is freedom from Tyranny. Follow the LondonDaygame Model if you love quality, choice, and freedom (and yes, I get the irony of American style freedoms granted by a model named after London, England). Or do nightgame if you agree with Stalin that quantity is a quality of sorts and/or you find it to be enjoyable or a good use of your time or you eagerly accept the tyranny of bouncers at the door of your favorite establishment. Do online game as a last resort – a subsistence ration in a Stockholm prison of your own choosing – a welfare distribution of sex for when you’re down and out.
To address the inevitable pearl clutching types who will no doubt feel personally attacked that I am hating on the use of online game. You don’t have to care. Keep slumming it. I wrote this for my own amusement, I don’t care what you or anyone does. Do online game if you want. I don’t care. Just don’t tell me how awesome it is – I don’t believe you.
You’re free to slum it any way you like and whenever you want, you don’t need to justify it to anyone. However, I have zero sympathy for guys who aren’t satisfied with the quality they get online or at night. If they are, great!
And your point is…?
If you slum it in daygame, the opportunities available on the street will force you to approach something you want more. If you slum it in nightgame, well, you’re making the best of a situation with some limitations and conditions (spatial, temporal, social, logistical, financial), but it’s just for a night or a short period of time until you go out again and try with a different set of limitations and conditions. If you do online game, you are almost certainly slumming it. This is why daygame makes us better men, it holds us to a higher standard of the women we choose (call it the standard of freedom), and naturally forces us to not settle or slum it with girls we will have sex with but wish were better in some ways.
Update 2/2/2020
After another day of thinking about it I had a few more thoughts to add:
Women rarely know what they are attracted to outright, and it also depends on their moods. With online game, you’re giving girls too much credit for knowing what they want, most of them don’t have any clue so they’re gonna guess they want to guy between a certain age of a certain height and they may or may not be attracted to him – his vibe and dominance and how he is in person will matter significantly, as will her mood in the moment.
When you’re on the street, approaching her one on one, you have a chance of being the most interesting guy in her world – you’re not competing with anyone else directly in that moment if she’s open to meeting someone. When you are in a bar or a club, you have a chance to be the most interesting guy in the room, which might go well for you, since you are only competing against other guys in the room. When you are online, you have a chance to be the most interesting man in her queue – which for any girl online is hundreds.
And actually, since a large percentage of girls in major cities are online, even in daygame and at bars and clubs you are competing with her online queue. I have no data to support this theory but I suspect that 6s and 7s are more likely to invest in online dating than 8s and 9s, who don’t need to (unless they have some psychological deficiency that makes them need more attention and validation). There are some hot girls online, but some are definitely not online, and those hot ‘offline’ girls are actually more receptive to your approach because you are not having to compete with their queue. I think quality online is lower than nightgame which is itself lower than daygame because of a law similar to supply and demand.
Daygame generally has a higher yield of quality when you get to a certain skill level, and I think that efficiency appeals to guys on the wrong side of about 28 or so with some online game and nightgame experience – they are old enough to recognize the folly of youth and appreciate that time is valuable and quality is important.
Bond Analogy
ROI is easy to compute in dollars, and if all notches were equal it would be simple to compare daygame, nightgame and online game. But for most men, the quality of women matters, analogous to bond ratings:
This will only make sense if you understand basic finance – apologies to the 80% of you for whom this will whoosh over your head
With limited capital, time and attention to invest, most of what you sift through in online game is going to be speculative subprime grade. You can still get a return with online game, just like you can still get a return in subprime bonds, but you may not want to hold them long term as they may end up worthless. Nightgame can land you more medium grade, better quality, but still with some risk of default. Daygame is looking for younger hotter tighter, the bond world equivalent of deals in AAA Prime bonds, most of which are fairly priced, but occasionally you’ll find a deal and it may be a good investment. Diversify your portfolio. If a guy does only online game, or only night game, he has a concentrated portfolio risk in risky assets with a higher chance of default and it is unlikely he has much experience with younger hotter tighter AAA Bonds or ability to invest in them or even recognize deals when they appear. If he only does daygame, he is concentrating his risk in higher quality bonds – which is admittedly conservative. As people age they need to take less portfolio risk and become more conservative, focus on preserving investment capital and investing in higher quality bonds. Another reason that Daygame often seems to seem like a good idea when guys hit about 28. Also could be the reason that guys like Krauser and Roosh with a lot of experience are only looking for AAA YHT girls for wives and making babies – who knows if they’ll find it; AAA guys attract AAA girls.
Just sent a girl home after spending a nice new years eve with her just chilling at my place. She made some food and I made some drinks and we watched a movie and had some sexy times. I sent a new year ping to many old leads from the past year and heard back from more than I expected. There is another girl I recently closed who is traveling for New Years Eve, so I didn’t have any scheduling conflicts. I will probably see the traveling girl later this week.
2019 Highlights
In 2019, I had the most significant age gap with a girl I closed. It was also a really fast close, 2.5 hours meet to close. She was a tourist. Over 18, but less than the maturity threshold (computed as half your age plus 7). I’m trying hard to preserve my anonymity and avoid revealing my age.
Dated a European film actress who “had a boyfriend.” She visited me at her own expense later in the year.
I went on a lot of dates in the first few months of 2019 that when I look back, I shouldn’t have gone on them – or I should have structured them very differently. I’ve gotten better at identifying time wasters (also with some advice from Mr. V).
Statistics
Statistics update. 2960 lifetime approaches through Dec 31, 2019. 1849 approaches in 2019 (average of 5.06 per day).
95% of approaches were done in NYC. 5% in Europe. I’m doing purely daygame. I don’t use tinder or any online, and I think I’ve been to a bar for nightgame about 3-5 times total this year and maybe got one number, so these numbers reflect almost pure daygame.
I approach a surprising number (surprising to me anyway) of models, actresses, ballerinas, artists, and Russian speaking tourists that stand out (usually because of the way they are dressed, which is better than most normal American women). I am consistently getting a number for every 10 approaches, and approaching younger and hotter.
Some twitter guys who sell books claim it should be 1 in 5. But they don’t provide any context and they haven’t approached very much, if at all, in NYC as far as I know, and NYC is harder than Europe. Krauser says for every 5 years of age difference it is 2x harder, so I’m actually doing amazing. NYC is one of the big leagues of young attractive women, I’m doing fine and happy with my results:
Plotted another way, the number of girls i need to approach to get a date is 40 computed over all approaches, and if I throw out my beginner data as noise, it drops to 28-33ish when computed over a window of the previous 12 months:
Which, if you are doing the math, 1 number for 10 approaches, and one date for every 28 approaches, it’s about a 1/3 chance of converting a number to a date:
In 2019, I had between 4-10 dates per month (except September (1) and January (2)). Again, only from daygame.
Approach to Close Ratio
2960 lifetime approaches in a city of 8 Million People (~4 million women), I’m getting close to 1/1000 women in NYC, and that’s not adjusted for age range or hotness.
Closing 7 girls over 2960 lifetime approaches is 1 in 422 approaches. That’s not good on the surface, and both Jimmy Jambone and Bodipua were like “That’s an awful lot of work, you should probably give up and do something else.” But hey, that’s me reporting my lifetime statistics, because I bothered to keep them – maybe other people were that bad to start but didn’t record data. Recently Rivelino shared his stats, and people shamed him or mocked him (and some respected him) for his honesty.
Digging below the surface of the raw data, in the past 3 months, I closed 3 new girls, over the course of 270 approaches, or 1 in 90. 1 in 50 (claimed by Krauser and Torero) to 1 in 30 (my estimate of RoyWalker) is what one would claim as an advanced daygamer. Thomas Crowne also had some thoughts. This is why, in my head (arguably the only place that matters), I am now an intermediate.
Toward the end of 2018, I had learned the mechanics of daygame approaching, I was in a girl tornado, and I knew how to escalate after kissing a girl, but it turned out that my texting and dating to escalate to the kiss needed significant work, and I worked on it this year. Mr. V also helped me improve my teasing during approaches, and that made a significant difference.
I wanted to compute how well I did this year to filter out my first year results when I didn’t approach enough. So here is the last year mapped out, approaches to close (apr-x) and approaches to close and near misses (apr-xnm) so I could estimate how well I am actually doing:
Near misses were girls I didn’t close, but kissed at least twice and tried to escalate on in my apartment. For whatever reason I couldn’t get them out again (over-escalated, LMR, they left the next day, met another guy, etc.). I computed this very conservatively. Girls I only kissed once were not included.
If I include my near-misses, over the last 6 months I’m at around 1/150, and over the last 3 months I’m at 1/100 (Oct-19), 1/70 (Nov-19) and 1/40 (Dec-19). Maybe I’m on a hot streak (after a cold streak this summer) but I think it’s more likely I became consistent enough that I graduated to being an intermediate. Looking at the data, there seems to be a clear improvement to my consistency after April 2019, so sometime between then and December 2019, I became an intermediate daygamer.
For those with difficulty comprehending the chart above, the spikes above 600 are due to computing a window over months and having a close fall out of the sliding window used to compute the stats. Having a dry spell of 3 months of near misses with no closes makes the 3 month approach to close ratio infinity – which I capped at 1200.
I’ve been very cautious about declaring my skill level to be anything other than a beginner. When the data started to level out consistently, and having finally achieved a streak of a new girl per month for 3 months in Q4 2019, this was the signal I needed to acknowledge that I was probably at the next level.
It was particularly funny to me when someone on twitter recently said something like “some twitter guru you are”. I’m nothing of the sort, I’m not selling anything, teaching this stuff is a thankless job. However, sharing my path – what progression of real stats look like over time is one way I can contribute – because there is so much bullshit out there.
I’m dating 2 girls now, so I have to balance that with continuing to approach. We’ll see how that goes. December 2019 I only did 25 approaches due to a combination of weather and dates and having a girl visit me regularly. This is also another sign I take of being an intermediate – being good enough that you have to balance dating girls you met via daygame with approaching enough to stay sharp and keep progressing.
I have a few ideas for what I need to work on to become advanced, but it can be summarized with more dates from more approaches and trying locations outside of New York City.
I started recording audio of my sets last month. I use the Olympus VP-10, it cost $80 but was worth it. The quality is good, the battery life is long, and it is USB so it’s easy to transfer to my computer. I use quicktime to trim audio files down to my approaches. It’s a little cringe sometimes to hear the mistakes you make in set, but it gives you more feedback which speeds up the learning process. I should have done it sooner.
Anyway, as I was listening to my sets, and a few instadates, sometimes sharing them with wings for their feedback (and roasting), a number of both tiny and glaring nice guy behaviors started to appear as patterns, reminding me of one of the fundamental mantras of game:
Patterns emerge over time.
Mystery
Nice guy behaviors can be more articulately defined as polite yet undeserved pedestalization taught by society – parents who mean well, hollywood, bad advice from girls, etc.
The opposite of nice guy behavior is push-pull behavior. You’re not flat and boring, you’re shifting sands, keeping her on her toes. This gets her attention. She notices. She may start to feel attraction.
I’m just going to rattle off my list that I’ve been compiling for a few weeks now.
Saying “sorry” upon stopping her or anything that implies her time is worth something, e.g. Mr. V’s “really quickly” also has this problem
Saying “wow” instead of “ok” or “fair enough” when she tells you something. You don’t have to be so easily impressed. Or so reactive. You stopped her, remember?
Not teasing properly, and just complimenting her. You have to take back the compliment or you are subtly putting her on a pedestal.
Stacking with subsequent compliments is bad. If she doesn’t take the compliment well or corrects you, you must throw it back at her with a push (credit to @Mr.V Daygame) “I’m not French” “Darn, I wanted you to join my pantomime club.”
Letting a conversation drone on. “She will let you be as boring as you can accidentally make it.” –@Mr.V Daygame
Not setting a sexual enough frame, more bluntly stated as “hiding your dick” and you can spike and compliment her legs, her eyes, her hair, etc.
Testing the sexualization by stepping in when the opportunity presents itself. If she unconsciously steps back, that tells you it’s more friendly or she has a bf or isn’t comfortable yet. If she takes it, that’s almost universally a good sign.
Not challenging her. No is a good thing to say, but challenging her makes you stand out. The main point is to show you don’t take her too seriously. Taking her at face value – she’s used to that, she expects it. When you challenge her, she notices it because you’re different. It also conveys subtly that you might be equal or higher status which gets her attention.
Accepting her frame. I recently lost a frame by talking about fur on a girls coat. “It’s fake fur” was her response. I talked about fake leather in her shoes and accused her of being a vegan. Not bad, but I fell into her frame. She was a Brazilian model I stopped on a cold day, and while she enjoyed my stop and teasing, after I lost the frame, she was suddenly cold enough to have to go on her way.
Asking too many questions in a row. Usually girls “have to go” after you start interviewing them. Similarly, if you stack 2-3 times, and she corrects you each time but doesn’t really hook, continuing to try is just cringe.
Being too thirsty. Being too eager is often the opposite of hiding your dick. There is a balance. I don’t really have this problem during approaches, but I have been that guy over text, pushing too hard or too soon for a meetup, bending over backwards to schedule something, double texting, texting more lines of text than she does.
Accepting bad behavior. Continuing to provide attention after a girl mistreats you (doesn’t agree to date requests for a week or two – no one is that busy, doesn’t show up – explanation or not), etc.
Apologizing. Most of the time you don’t need to. Err on the side of not apologizing. “I feel bad for you…” is more effective. On a related note, I find myself correcting girls who over apologize – “you don’t need to apologize for that” (Mr.V, after reading this, said it’s better to say “You gotta stop apologizing” and I agree that is more direct and probably better) and it usually feels like the right thing to do, probably because I get annoyed with people (men and women) who apologize too much.
Overexplaining
Overexplaining was one of the biggest things I was doing wrong. That’s why it gets its own list. I was going into too much depth about my vivid experiences, clever reasoning and imaginative ideas. Being clever and imaginative are great qualities but they need to be streamlined for seduction. You get some points for having it, but too much of anything and she will get bored. @jimmy_jambone in his interview with Rivelino said something like “When on a date the game is 10% and the rest is just being normal.”
Explaining your logical and reasoning too much, instead just describe decisions and accomplishments/achievements. Another way of describing this is informative communication vs direct communication. She feels your leadership and success and feels safe when you make decisions and stick to them and communicate it directly (a testament to the strength of your frame). Explaining too much signals investment in converting her, which implies you are not as secure in your frame. It is also informative communication and more simply, she will just get bored. Boring is bad.
Overdoing achievements and status and job success can also fall into the trap mentioned immediately above. Girls hate it when a guy won’t shut up about how successful he is. I actually downplay some of my success, and I’m experimenting to figure out the right amount to present so she recognizes I’m successful, but it doesn’t come across as overexplaining to prove it to her.
Passion sharing is good. Overexplaining is bad. There is a balance between them. It’s unlikely that a girl is likely to truly share your passion, and if she does, that’s great, but it’s not that valuable in the grand scheme of seduction (often it is conversational quicksand); you should seduce her first and then talk more about that shared passion after consummation. She more than likely wants to know that you have one, and that you’re authentic and not full of shit. Talk about a passion of yours enough, but not so much that it seems like you’re trying to convert her to your pokemon religion, as going too deep into a passion might even come across as autism.
Explaining yourself at all. Instead of “I just had to come talk to you” or “I was just curious about you”, I liked it is the only explanation you need. She doesn’t care much for your explanation – she will ask for it if she wants it – usually the only explanation I need to provide comes in the form of “wait, where did you see me”, “back there” *point*.
One common overexplanation I would use in set is when I run out of things to say sometimes, I try to buy some more time with an explanation “that’s all I got” which would sometimes create the vacuum and get her talking. Stronger is “that’s all the attention I can give you” or just using silence without calling it out (riskier in a street stop as her momentum might flare up again).
There is a chance that trimming away all of these nice guy behaviors makes you too smooth, or too brutish. That’s probably a good problem to have, I’m not there yet.
By fixing these things and becoming unconsciously competent in them, you are also much less likely to slide back into being a beta if you do get into a relationship. Holding your frame, keeping her on her toes, prevents her from getting bored and keeps the spice going in the relationship and keeps the sexy times rolling.
One other thing that happened as I went through this process of trimming out nice guy behaviors is I became much less tolerable to girls I had been “friends” with. I’ve been friends with a few girls for something like 10 years, they’re too old for me to be interested in dating them. I don’t ask them for advice or even talk much about my life because they get triggered when I talk about dating a girl much younger than them, and if I do anything wrong with regards to seducing a girl and ask for advice (like when I escalated too quickly without pumping the breaks on a nice German girl in July and she promptly left of my apartment) they take the girls side over mine. One of them literally said “you’re an asshole that was just trying to fuck [the German girl]” whereas I had genuinely liked that German girl. Haven’t spoken to that “friend” since. I don’t need that kind of energy in my life. I actually wonder if being friends with girls is just being accepting and tolerant of their bad behavior (most of the time – I am sure there are exceptions, I don’t care to explain further). When I started recognizing it in daygame, I started recognizing it in other areas of my life.
Daygame taught and continues to reinforce all this. Nightgame and online game didn’t. Do daygame. Or don’t. I don’t actually care what you do. No one is coming to save you (my favorite mantra whenever I feel approach anxiety).
So Tom Torero took everything down, theory being that some uncalibrated guy in Scotland got arrested for aggressively hounding girls for their number and got 2 years jail time. WTF UK legal system. Also, why do your judges wear wigs?
These types of unfortunate events are why you must let girls go quickly if they’re not into it, which, in my experience, causes them to crack a smile – they recognize you are calibrated enough to let them go and leave them alone after their subtle IOD (or a not so subtle NYC IOD) and they are able to resume their life, with a touch of validation from your tease/compliment. Maybe next time you or someone else opens them they will give you their number or they’ll be in a talkative mood. Leave the girl better than you found her.
Anyway, Tom (whom Nash has called out as being sneaky) freaked out and took everything down. I have no idea how aggressive the journalists and law enforcement and other totalitarian elements have become in Britain because of Brexit or Bojo, so it may have been the right move for him, but it was a loss for the community.
As I posted recently, his date video (RIP) was really helpful when I was learning. Since it is no longer available, as someone commented, I thought I would post my notes from the video here, which is not far off from a transcript… …formatting isn’t perfect because I have better things to do.
The basic premise is there is a clock. Each number on the clock is either red (pull and escalate) or blue (push and lean back), and you go in sequence. If you have multiple dates, you are winding back the clock sometimes.
1 o’clock blue
walk to venue 1
Let’s go,
ask how her day was,
tell how your day was,
sights on the street.
neutral.
2 oclock red
venue 1 well lit, coffee shop, pub, sports bar
spike in venue 1, flirty upon entry
o Can I trust you?
o Good team player?
o Good Future wife?
o Give her a job. Find best seat. Best view. Send her off to find seats.
o Text her as she walks off, nice ass.
3oclock blue
about you and about her, giving rapport
o where she lives,
o where she is working right now,
o what you do,
o a little about who you are,
o where she is from
o vibing making her feel comfortable, comfort rapport, not spiking
o no comfort quicksand
After about 30 minutes bounce to venue 2.
4 o’clock red
Bounce to Venue 2
o Let’s Go
o Where are we going
o We’re going to Paris
o We’re going to Vegas to lose all our money
o What are you doing? Just looking at your legs
o Close to next venue. Closeish to first venue.
o Sofa and couches, 90 degrees or next to each other.
o Cool ambient music. Cocktails. Funky like a coffee shop.
5 o’clock blue rapport – bigger topics,
o hopes and dreams,
o phobias,
o what she is going to do in the future,
o weird little thing about her,
o what she wanted to be,
o ends with a rooted base where you feel like you are on the same team
6 o’clock red spike – start to move to seduction bubble. Spiking physically
o talk fitness,
o tattoos rings,
o touch legs,
o comment about her eyes, legs distracting you,
o do you play a musical instrument, hand sizes,
o what is something I’d never guess about you?
o suntans,
o tattoos,
o necklace, earrings, rings,
o hair,
o toned body or what you like about her,
o what do you like about me,
o what you find attractive about her.
o You smile a lot, is it possible for you to not smile for 10 seconds?
o As you count, you eye fuck. Gets to 3-4 and giggles. Slap wrist. No no no. Try again.
o The eye contact and touch creates an intimacy.
7o’clock Blue Chill, give some space, let her spike it up or ask about me, sexy silence.
Lean back,
Look away,
Go to the bathroom,
Let her start to invest, or spike it up or ask about me.
Leave the sexy silence.
Exit at a high point if possible
8 o’clock red
Kiss: matters that you go for it, show intent, and if get knocked back, no butthurt
o Vibe should have escalated, flirting and touching.
o Floppy test – push her away, bring her in, give her a shoulder rub.
o Playing little games
o Drive by kisses – Eskimo kisses,
o Whisper in her ear, getting really close to her and pulling away.
o I’m going to keep trying. I think you’re attractive.
o My job to try, your job to resist, I understand, going to keep trying. Going to go to the bathroom, will try again.
o Not a long term provider boyfriend that is going to wait.
o You find her physically attractive and are not ashamed to say so.
9 o’clock blue
o courage and leading her to bounce home chill out
o out of the bar venue, where are we going?
o have something back at your place to encourage her to come
o One more drink at mine, music, photos, films
o Finish bottle of wine back at mine,
o Open door to taxi,
o Make sure to tell her where you are going, not a bar, not disneyland, seed pull
o Chill out – not keen or eager or twitchy or eager. Not a big deal
10 o’clock red spike at home
o Don’t stay and let vibe crash
o Can’t just stand in the kitchen or sit on the sofa and let the vibe crash to bog of comfort and rapport
o Shoes off, pour some drinks or make some tea
o Take her legs and spike across yours, bring her in. Watch a movie.
o Starting to give her a massage, start a kiss a little bit.
o On off on off. Push and pull. Calibration is red vs blue
o Letting her know back at yours that its on.
o If you’re lucky and it’s super on she jumps your bones.
o Usually the girl is more nervous and doesn’t want to appear like she’s too easy.
She’s going to say things like
o “I don’t normally do this”
o “Maybe I should go”
Good response: Cool, I understand, no worries
o take my laptop
o take her by the hand,
o let’s go in here, it’s more comfortable
11 o’clock – blue chill on bed
o back off once she’s in the bedroom
o often on the bed and she’s on the chair opposite
o or he’s leaning back and she’s on the corner of the bed
o big mistake would be to go 100 miles an hour like a horny teenager
o chill out watch a bit of the movie, drink some wine set the mood, look at some photos
o feel like there is a calm atmosphere, come and join me, take her hand and bring her over, or sit her on your lap, sit her next to me,
o then a little bit more kissing, on off on off, and reaching the magical 12 o’clock
12 o’clock – red sexy time
self explanatory
If she stops the clock at 11:00 or 11:30, set up a date, cooking, DVD, etc.
So I did a trip to Europe. Up early due to Jet Lag. Figure I’ll write it up.
Purpose of the trip for me was not actually to get +1s (though I was sure going to try) though I think I could have if I had stayed longer in each city. The purpose of this trip was to gain perspective and to compare New York City to several large European cities and see if New York is actually a more challenging city in which to do Daygame. I haven’t met anyone that can provide actual experience or data – but everyone on twitter seems to have an opinion. I had to figure it out for myself. The European daygamers don’t often come to New York – it’s further away, very expensive, and full of feminists.
I have the means and skills to move to Europe (if you can make it in New York you can make it anywhere), so I took this trip pretty seriously as a survey and scouting mission.
Paris
I started in Paris. Paris is a cheap flight hub from New York. My inbound flight was $150. Bargain.
Immediately I noticed I would get more IOIs than in New York. I was walking around the center of the city, high foot traffic areas. Got a few phone numbers, from a French art student and a Spanish economics student. Some of the girls I stopped turned out to be Russian speaking – but they had boyfriends or husbands, as pretty K-selected girls often do.
I had closed a French girl earlier this year in New York, and she lived in Paris, so I thought I would try to visit her. Of course as soon as I booked my tickets, she told me her boyfriend is moving into her apartment the weekend I would arrive. Hmmpf. We met for coffee during my trip and she told me she hooked up with another guy over the summer and then decided to be exclusive to her boyfriend (!). She dropped some validation lines about how she is super happy to see me and how I make her feel good. This just felt like a line for orbiters or chumps, a verbal tip. I must have given her too much attention. Counterpoint: she was talking to me as a lover – telling me about her provider strategy and asking for advice. This is something I read about in Zan Perrion’s Alabaster girl – girls he was a lover to would often ask for advice about their love life while in bed with him (she and I had talked about her relationship with her boyfriend after the last time we had sex). She’s likely more broken than I had realized, not going to spend more time on her, but to keep open the possibility of player pension dividends, I told her to come have fun with me if this relationship thing she’s trying doesn’t work out. She wanted to meet me at a cafe once more on the morning I was going to leave, and I said I would try if I woke up and then didn’t show – I went to a museum instead and posted an instagram story about it. Felt like the right thing to do.
I had also contacted two leads I met in New York who lived in Paris. One of them was in a different country on business, but was very responsive (despite not hearing from me for 2 months) and wanted to meet the next time I was in Paris. The other lead I had taken on a coffee date in New York before she disappeared. This was a Russian speaking girl. She was surprised to hear from me but very down to come out. Hard frame battle ensued over the course of two drinks, she was telling me some things about how motivated she was to achieve some goals (masculine vibe blah blah blah) and I qualified her on her intensity and found a playful way to make fun of her which she LOVED. She wasn’t clearly accepting my verbal escalation but she wasn’t leaving, and was complying. I went for a kiss about halfway through the second drink, got rejected but held my frame that it was important that I tried and that she knew I tried. We then went for a walk along the river, she told me some things and we started kissing. After a little bit she ran away into an Uber, claiming she had to get up for class in the morning.
The next day I suggested we keep it going, she agreed, I suggested cooking at her place, and she started to get squirrelly after that telling me she had a class project and would let me know if she could make it. I let it go from there.
My airbnb was tiny but in a very central location, I didn’t quite feel confident pulling here there, but I think my peak opportunity to pull was after our first proper kiss along the Seine. That was the right time to try and invite her in.
After 2 days had a few leads and some girls responding over text, but I was only in Paris for a few days, and didn’t have much time to work. Saw one Daygamer on the street – he was a French speaking African and had a backpack on and was approaching posh looking French girls, didn’t seem to have much calibration or luck. I did an approach and he walked by, but I’m not sure he recognized what I was doing.
Warsaw
I arrived in the afternoon, and Thomas Crown was already here. He had told me roughly the area to try day gaming, and so I walked around on my own. We met up later after he had been on a date and did another walk around together. While I was in a shop he opened a girl, she was weird and squirrelly, when I came out of the shop he was just winding it down with her and some polish street promoter started talking to her, so I entered to chat with TC and give some social proof. Well the promoter guy runs off, and TC decides to go into the shop and I continue the conversation with her. She was still squirrelly, not revealing the country where she was from, and somehow TC comes back and invites her into his place, and I eject to go put my shopping in my apartment (which by chance was 2 doors down from TC). He said it didn’t really go anywhere and she was a strange girl. Interesting winging experience my first night.
I got some IOIs in Poland. Not as many as in Paris. I approached often without getting an IOI. I have been told in the US that I look Polish, so that could also be why I didn’t get as many IOIs, its possible I am not exotic or polarizing enough. The girls were walking slower and would often stop. I did have a girl leave mid set, without saying a word when her friend showed up. That has never happened to me before. My imagined story is that she had a boyfriend and didn’t want the news to get back to him that she was talking to a handsome stranger in the street. Who knows?
The next day, I walked along the main Daygame route and did a few approaches, girls were stopping, we would chat for a few minutes and then inevitably a boyfriend would be mentioned. This was a common pattern – a K-select country. I asked them all how they met – no one met online. Anyway, TC joined later in the afternoon, and one of my first approaches after he joined turned into an instadate. A 24 year old Russian (of course) lawyer that I later found out was a gymnast. I took her for coffee, her English wasn’t that strong so we started to rely on google translate. This was my first real google translate date, ever. As I was talking into the phone with the voice recognition I would stare into her eyes – it seemed to get a good response – she liked the voice and eye contact and the mystery of what I was trying to say which would soon be revealed. I found out she had been on a trip with a guy and broke it off with him in the middle of a trip (a good and bad sign), we then went to a tourist site together (she paid for our tickets), and I got some leading and playful vibes going. She joined me for a drink, and this is where she really started asking me questions about myself. It was going well, then it took a while to pay for the drinks (customer service in Poland, not so good), and I could feel the buying temperature had dropped a little bit. I bounced her to another bar nearby, and the buying temperature dropped more. She asked me how old I was. I didn’t lie. Probably should have. We agreed to meet the next day and she “ran off to meet friends” at 9PM, which I didn’t really believe – it felt like a false curfew. She left my WhatsApp ping the next day unread. In hindsight, I should have tried for a bounce to my apartment for tea as soon as we left the first drink place. TC was inspired by my instadate and went out and got a gutter game close. We got pizza later that night and debriefed. TC is a solid dude.
Anyway, I did some more approaches the next day, lots of girls with boyfriends. No luck, no numbers. Met up with TC and Mr R (who lives in Poland) and walked around some.
The next day was my last day (again just in town for a few days), and I was hell bent on making something happen (Never Ever Give Up), and I ended up on an instantdate with a Ukranian girl who was on her way to see the Joker movie. Determined in about 40 minutes that she was a timewaster and she wasn’t accepting any verbal escalation, got a number from a Ukrainian girl claiming to be a model (I made fun of her for that) but couldn’t get her out, and then I met a Polish girl in her 30’s and idated her to a bar nearby (same one I took the Russian to the day before, and the waitress totally recognized me). We ended up kissing in front of my airbnb, but she wouldn’t come in. I walked her to her hotel (to try and get invited in, and it didn’t happen).
Vienna
The girls in Austria liked me. Quite a few of them commented on being approached (this never happens, thank you for approaching, you’re very brave, Austrian men would never do this). I hit the major shopping and tourist streets for a few days and got some IOIs. I got much better at recognizing IOIs. I was surprised that I would get a lot of IOIs from Russian girls with their families. 95% of the girls stopped in Vienna. The ones that didn’t told me they didn’t speak English. 20% of what I stopped was Russian speaking. Saw no daygamers my entire time there. I got a number from a Hungarian student, a blonde Italian student, an Austrian, (all of whom responded enthusiastically but didn’t come out – this was the first week of school) and went on an idate with another Austrian – she was very compliant and into it (and texted me first) and I think I could have closed if I had a few more days to run game. I met some girls that I probably would have gotten a number from if I were there longer. I met plenty of girls with boyfriends, they were still great to talk to, and none of them met online. I plan to long game the girls I met in Vienna. I doubt it’s a magic place, but part of this Daygame discovery journey is to figure out parts of the world where girls like you and your look. I think Austria might very well be one of those places for me. Cost of living is about half of New York, the marriage laws are favorable to men vs the anglo/commonwealth countries. Central European girls also seem to want to have kids, unlike American women who just want a dog baby.
I also spent a day in Bratislava, Slovakia since it is so close to Vienna, Austria. It was a waste of time. Small city center and a nice shopping mall. The mall was where I had the most luck. Did a few approaches but it didn’t go anywhere.
Conclusions
Paris was comparable to New York in terms of quality – 7’s with some 8’s and 9’s that turned out to be Russian. It was also around the fashion week time, so there were plenty of models running around. Volume was lower though due to lower population density. English levels were higher than I expected. Paris was clean and I felt pretty safe.
Poland average was somewhere between 7 and 7.5. Better than Prague (where in my opinion the average was between 6.75 and 7.25 if we are splitting hairs). Volume was lower and lots of girls had boyfriends (as one would expect of pretty girls in a k-selected country). Prettiest girls I approached in Poland turned out to be Russian or Ukranian. English levels were higher than I expected. Poland was clean, safe, cheap and the busses ran on time.
Austria average was similar to Poland between 7 and 7.5, maybe just a hair lower because I have a slight preference for the slimmer profile of girls of Poland, but I seemed to get a warmer response from Austrian girls and the girls living in Austria, which surprised me. They also seemed more musical and artistic. English levels were very high. Austria was clean and safe and the public transit was great. Architecture is fantastic. This is my favorite city so far.
In all 3 countries I visited this trip (and Prague too from an earlier trip this year) the girls walk slower and stop easier but the population density is lower than Manhattan, and thus the possible approach volume is lower.
Europe *is* easier. Sample size for this trip: 80 approaches, 10 numbers, 5 dates -> 3 bungled pull attempts. I’m still working on my calibration for pulling, and I learned about recognizing the high point of the date and trying to escalate at that point. I know it sounds obvious, but I am having to re-learn and rebuild this part of my game. Losing some hot girls is always a powerful learning experience that gets burned into your memory.
It makes sense that the London Daygame model was invented in Europe, it would have taken significantly more energy to develop it in New York (and Paul Janka is probably the only innovator we really had over here).
I might do another jaunt or two, or I might just up and move to Europe in a few months – I have to see how a few business things shake out.
It was braver still to act on them. It’s like the tide is going out on your ego and you’re going to see how good you are. I feel pretty naked. The tide is out. By playing to win, instead of playing to not lose, I am currently losing, or at least not winning. But what is daygame if not an exercise in delayed gratification. It would be demoralizing if I couldn’t figure out what to work on next. But I did, and you’re going to read about it.
Krauser talks about this frustration. He calls it out as “not actually doing daygame” but rather “having a nice chat with a stranger.” Yep, that’s what it feels like. Combined with some guys on Twitter telling me what my stats should be (they are likely right, but it’s hard to trust guys on twitter, especially the ones there for marketing purposes). I think this might be a reasonably accurate assessment of where I am in the process. I keep wishing I would figure these things out faster, but one of my favorite quotes from Mystery is that “patterns emerge over time.” Anyway, I have a slightly different conclusion than Krauser about how to break out of the “nice chat with a stranger phase,” and I’ll get to that later.
I’m good at approaching and I like talking to girls, ok, I’m good at having nice chats with girls. I’ve gotten many numbers and dates and even pulled a handful of girls (strongly available maybes and 1 definite yes girl). Many kisses, many near misses. I’m much more confident than I was 3-6-12-24 months ago. This was despite playing to not lose. Roy Walker described me as enthusiastic a few months ago and warned me of a phase most daygamers encounter when it becomes a grind. After the occasional setback, I often think “Ok, maybe I’m at that point now,” but it goes away after a few days and a few good sets.
My main problem right now is my frame. My frame leaks nice guy way too often. Nice guy has been leaking out of me all summer. In case you didn’t know girls in NYC really don’t like nice guys. This has been revealed by letting go of the ego game of playing to not lose and challenging myself to see what happens when I play to win (and I lost a lot more).
I’ve been building a boat to cross the river. An analogy that Nash uses often when we talk. Clearly a manly boat, I’m in shape, successful enough, tall enough, fit enough, leader of men, protector of others, check, check, check, but my frame is wrong. My boat looks pretty good but has an obvious leak and girls don’t want to get into a leaky boat.
Returning to reality from the analogy, here are some examples of what goes wrong:
In my approaches, sometimes my tease hits but then the rest of my conversation turns into an informational chat and becomes nice guy. Mr. V coined something like this “Your conversation with a girl will become as boring as you both can accidentally make it.” If the tease doesn’t hit, it’s usually a good indicator that she’s not in the mood to talk and it’s not going to go anywhere, but when the tease hits and it dies, it’s on me and my frame. I know I can’t get them all, but I can do better and I will.
Also, frequently in approaches and on dates, I give too much value, like something out of Japanese politeness culture or Mr. Rodgers neighborhood: “Oh you’re a singer, that’s cool and you must have a wonderful voice.” It works great for making friends and influencing people. It’s definitely a staple of my management style, and it makes me approachable and works great for leading teams and male and female employees. It just doesn’t work for attracting girls. This is part of the reason that many successful CEOs don’t do well in game. It’s too much carrot and not enough stick. My use of carrots is fine. I need to use more stick. It will probably make me a better leader too.
Instead I need to be more skeptical. It should be “You’re a singer? Oh God (credit Mr. V and hat tip to Mystery)! I hear autotune enables anyone to become a singer these days.” It’s subtle, but this preservation of my relative value in the interaction is probably the biggest missing ingredient of my frame. I just give it away. If I had it, I would unconsciously be more challenging and teasing. Referring to my analogy du jour, my frame just immediately leaks out of the hole in the bottom of my otherwise pretty cool boat.
If you see the girl as a glass that is half full, you’re not protecting the relative value frame and are in danger of slipping into nice guy. Accidentally, the girl is placed on a pedestal. If you see her as a glass that is half empty, the relative frame is skewed correctly, and it is more likely she will work to get you. Hypergamy is a thing. I would like to think I am actually relatively neutral on how I view each girl, part of that is I know I can just meet more, but I think I get skewed a little toward the glass half full perspective and lose my relative value frame because I am curious about them and not challenging enough. Curiosity is killing my pussy cat.
An example of losing the frame on dates: I get a girl out on a coffee date and the chat somehow slips into nice guy because I don’t go in with the correct relative value mindset, no challenge to her, just curiosity. That’s coming in at a disadvantage because of my mental frame. I have been counteracting this by trying to hit Magnum’s 5 points. I have had some success with this – a few dates where I got a girl to my apartment and lost her after kissing. The success so far has been in playing to not lose – I identified when a girl was repeatedly steering away from sexual topics and I decided to cut the date short. Helpful, but not enough. Need more challenge.
Another big thing that Mr.V pointed out to me about my dating conversation skills is getting into conversational quicksand (usually cultural quicksand where we end up talking about cultures too much) because I enjoy the topic. There are a few other topics like this that I have to avoid getting stuck on – I’m sure most guys have a few of these. The frame improvement for me is to say something about it, to show her a taste of my interests and personality and keep the seduction train moving through the station.
It is amused mastery, yet “I am the prize” that is spouted so often on Twitter just isn’t articulate enough. Neither is Lance Mason’s classic take on amused mastery: “everything she does is cute.” I am better than you needs to be subtly and constantly reiterated. Being a challenge. I’m skeptical so you need to work to impress me (which sounds like a mild form of dread game). The best she can do is that’s cute when she tries to fight and you enforce the frame until she submits and complies. Her reality is ridiculous no matter what – like most of us think of our bratty little sisters (if we have them). You reward her for submitting and complying and honoring you and your reality, but you have to maintain that relative value frame.
She needed less carrot and more stick too.
There is an escalation ladder of enforcing frame when a girl does behavior you don’t like (paraphrased from Krauser – source was his blog or one of his books, will update with the source later) followed by an explanation in carrot/stick terms:
1) Ignore (no carrot, no stick)
2) Joke about it (little stick)
3) Call it out (bigger stick)
4) Demote her/Next her (stick, no more carrots)
1 and 4 are passive strategies. They work if she’s attracted and is causing drama and notices you ignore it or step back and she will chase. That is if she is already attracted to you. I am actually pretty good at doing those naturally (withholding carrots), but they are passive and trying to attract a girl by ignoring her is generally a bad plan, and that goes double for NYC where there are so many shiny happy people holding hands.
Recalling the Mystery Method, active disinterest is where attraction is created, and that is essentially 2 and 3. You either tease her (preferable) or put her in her place or even frame crush (provide discipline her like her father should have). She’ll get a defensive tingle from that. This is the challenge aka the stick treatment.
Mystery’s classic example of active disinterest is “You’re French?” “I love French girls, I can’t even talk to you right now. *Back Turn*.”
I have not been consciously doing 2 & 3 and those are absolutely the weakest part of my game. Sometimes I would get lucky and it would work out and I think that’s how I got my dates and lays to this point. Getting lucky. That’s not really game. I should use more active disinterest to generate attraction, in approaches, on dates, all the time. Coupled with more tweaks to improve my overall relative value frame and remove conversational quicksand I expect to see more results. Good thing Mr. V is exceptionally good at teasing. You become an average of the 5 people you hang out with and I am getting better at teasing by hanging out with him.
In the last 6 months, I have definitely been escalating better. It puts a smile of validation on my face when a girl gives me the vibe of “Ooooh, how did we end up kissing like this, he knows how to escalate and I liiike it…” which gets verbalized as “…you move fast (said with a smile between kisses)…” When women describe being swept off their feet, this is what I imagine is happening.
Referring back again to Krauser’s post, he recommends a guy break out of the “friendly chat with strangers phase” by becoming more sexual in set. I agree, it helped when I actively did that a year ago. I regularly do spikes, stepping in, the little toe kick, laser eye contact, etc. But that is not my issue. This is part of the reason I am ending up in the situation with the girl where she is like “how did we end up kissing like this so quickly?” it was a friendly chat that turned sexual as I escalated and she complied and went along with it. She is a little surprised and often smiles as she gets swept off her feet. Hoever (I’m going to leave that typo there), even when it goes well, it is too much pull. Friendly chat + escalation is pull. That’s only half of the push-pull needed for seduction. She should start to feel like chasing me at that point. What is missing is the push, the active disinterest and making her work for it. If she is working for it, then she is not surprised by the escalation, and is a more active participant in the escalation and it proceeds much smoother.
Perhaps Krauser has a more naturally strong frame and so it doesn’t necessarily occur to him as a frequent issue. Or maybe I’ve just been developing in some unusual organic way. I’ve absorbed most of his teachings and gotten some results, but my diagnosis is that my frame (specifically holding my relative value frame and maintaining it by active disinterest) is my sticking point.
I’ve been losing some the past few weeks. It’s OK. One of the good things about solo sports, like… say… running… is that you are competing against yourself and you can train with and against others to motivate yourself to improve. Daygame is also a solo sport, and having a good friend in Nash, and a good wing in Mr. V (and Magnum and LongBurnDaFire) helps me sort through things quicker and bounce back from the daygame lowpoints when we are struggling with our sticking points.
Finally, this Twitter and Blog thing has been helpful for meeting new people. I spotted a guy on the street about a month ago who approached a girl I was about to approach. He did well and got her number. Then about 2 weeks ago, he approached Mr. V after Mr. V approached a girl he was about to go after. He was like “I read some Krauser, and I follow some guys on Twitter, Nash and Runner… …that put a smile on my face.” We’ve been out a few times since then, he has a really good vibe: enthusiastic and reminds me of myself a year ago. I don’t want to out him, but I know he’s reading. Those kind of encounters are the reward of having this blog.
Several dates and conversations led me to a big epiphany this week about playing to win instead of playing to not lose.
Approaching to win: I realized that a lot of my approaches have gone down a cultural interview path, or a friendly chat. Any leads from those go nowhere. I have been regularly guilty of playing to not lose: not teasing enough (not wanting to lose by having her possibly get offended), not making an attempt at holding them there longer (“ok, bye” instead of “hold on” that MrVDaygame uses), and not shutting up on occasion and letting them invest (and trying too hard to carry the conversation and keep it going when they just aren’t hooking). To stop doing this and open with the intention of winning, I have to go in with a stronger tease (which could fail) and be more polarizing with more spikes and “hold on, stay put” frame (which can be rejected), and giving them an opportunity to invest (which they may not). Higher quality sets will yield higher quality leads.
Texting to win: you could lose a girl to being overeager, and you could lose a girl to being too cool. Trying to time it just right and playing to not lose can trap you either way. I think I have been playing it too cool and too overeager at just the wrong times. My current model (which I am now testing) is to keep the energy going with a light tease text (nice to meet you Ms. Orange Soda) or something, and then try and keep the energy going, not falling into the trap (as Nash called it) of waiting too long and being too cool (a symptom of playing to not lose by overcompensating for not wanting to come across too eager/ thirsty). Girls in New York City are bombarded with men and activities and all sorts of distractions so you have to harvest their attention while you have it (trying to keep their attention would qualify as playing not to lose). So as long as they are compliant, I am now trying to respond rather quickly and with some light banter, and try and seed a date and get them out (as one should).
Anywhere along that line they can break things and cease being compliant and that is where an active push is the right move. An example of the push is when you attempt to invite her out for a drink (and this happened to me yesterday) and she says “can’t I have yoga at 715” and doesn’t offer an alternative time. I made fun of her lightly by “yoga yoga yoga yoga” and she responded with “I know, I know” and was more compliant after that. Still didn’t end up getting her out for other reasons, but I know she’s a dead lead and I played it to win. It felt good to know.
There are also girls that just want to be text buddies and never come out. By playing not to lose, she wins a friend. Yes, I am speculating that female friendships with each other are about as strong/valuable as a text buddy relationship (not very) and because you are afraid to lose, you end up losing your limited and valuable time on this earth.
Dating to win:Nash talks about trying to kiss a girl every date. Magnum talks about not kissing a girl on a short first date so that things escalate further and faster on the second date. Different methods, I’ve tried them both. Both work. What’s important is they have a plan, and they’re both dating to win.
Regarding dates: I had a date with a 2-set from Europe with MrVDaygame a week or so ago, and each thread of the conversation that he started had some point and often it was sexual. My conversational threads were all over the place and while some of my threads were teasing and sexual, there were enough neutral or repetitive threads that made it more of a fun cultural chat, as opposed to a sexual man-to-woman date conversation. I kept checking (and re-checking) certain conversational boxes over and over because I enjoyed talking about them, not because it was moving the seduction forward; this is not game, in fact it is anti-game. It is a trap I was falling into for a looooooong time, easily since I was a teenager. It’s humbling to be able to abstract my former attempt at “game” as “Oh you like _____ too! Let’s talk about _____. Of course she’ll like me if we both like to talk about _____ and I tease her a bit and escalate” and while it did work on occasion if she really liked me, if she was on the fence the anti-game would repel her because it is a subtle form of playing not to lose. And the worst part is, I thought I had game. Ugh. Instead, the way to go is acknowledging and appreciating a mutual interest and then cutting the thread and moving the seduction train forward: “I like that you like _____, it makes me feel like we have a connection. What’s that funny look you’re giving me, you nerd? *playful push*”
Regarding series of dates: Particularly Russian speakers and New York career girls on the wrong side of 28 like to have rules in place for how many dates it takes to seduce them. I like to move fast enough to get their attention and show off some confidence (I like it when they are kissing me with a big smile and telling me “You move pretty fast” though I fuck this up occasionally by trying to move too fast and coming across as too eager not going 2 steps forward and 1 step back). Occasionally, when I move that fast, and we have comfort, then little compliance and frame tests come up. Come visit me in Brooklyn! (before we’ve had a sexy time). Enough of these, and you realize it just isn’t going to happen for whatever reason. Her programming is to not get pregnant with the wrong guy, and I am running into all sorts of fences to the possibility of the sexy situation where she could possibly get pregnant. By putting up with that, I am playing to not lose. To her it looks like I am so invested in the idea of getting with her that I will put up with whatever bullshit she wants to throw at me; as a result we are less likely to get together and stay together if we do get together. Ultimately it’s a waste of time and energy.
Many romantic stories are told by grandparents (“He just kept pursuing me! I finally had to say yes!”), but I suspect that those stories are omitting that some small amount of progress or compliance was being demonstrated each time, or it’s just Grandma reminiscing about what it felt like to be pursued.
What is the advantage of playing to win?
My hypothesis is that playing to not lose is less likely have winning outcomes. Your energy is focused on winning and winning only. Sounds a lot like the idea of top guy that Nash and Yohami keep bandying about: top guy has so much abundance he can only see the girls saying yes and doesn’t even notice any girl saying no. I’m not top guy, but I occasionally get a taste when a girl tornado gets going (where I have more leads than I can manage) and only the girls that step forward make it through because they are all I can see. When I’m not in a girl tornado, I can emulate top guy behavior by playing to win.
There’s a classic wall street book “Hedge Fund Market Wizards” about successful Hedge Fund managers by Jack Schwager, and in his interview with Ed Seykota, he asked “What are the elements of good trading?” Ed’s response “The elements of good trading are: 1) cutting losses, 2) cutting losses, and 3) cutting losses. If you can follow these three rules, you may have a chance.” There’s an old trader saying that is at least 150 years old: “let your winners run and cut your losses short.” As Nash has said, if he’s making progress with a girl, letting it take a few more dates to seduce her is very OK. He’s letting a winning girl run. A calibrated play to win.
By having a lot of volume and approaching often, it can set you up to play to win and emulate top guy behavior, as you are forced to cut girls quickly when they disappear or don’t comply or otherwise misbehave, and just the winners remain in the running (until they misbehave). You cut your losses by avoiding chasing her (and rewarding her bad behavior) or attempting to negotiate desire and get her to come around, which frequently ends up being a waste of effort and energy. You can then focus your energy on the winners or looking for more winners.
I have also found it to be emotionally relieving to identify the girls who are going to not comply or behave badly, make one attempt at a corrective action, and then let them go if it doesn’t work. I gave them a shot, played to win, didn’t work, move on and don’t think about it further. This is also the mindset of elite athletes, if they miss a shot, they shake it off, and focus their energy on the next one, that unhindered psychological focus is a big part of their training and development that enables them to perform at an elite level.
