My alarm rudely awakened me at 10am, and I rushed through my morning shower and breakfast with a spring in my step then arrived on time at the station to meet Johnny and Jimmy. After half an hour or so of Jimmy complaining that there were no hot girls around, Johnny went off and did a demonstration, plucking the phone number from a cute blond girl in five minutes or so. We were watching him from a distance thinking, “Is this really happening?” Then he sauntered back, phone in hand, grinning. We were dumbfounded.

Johnny would later confide that he was shitting himself. Jimmy was there to check out his game and report back to the team if he was good enough.

He pulled us to one side down a quiet street and taught us the basic approach, which goes thus:

1. Let hot girl walk past you, letting her put a few metres in front of you;
2. Chase her with a playful jog until you are alongside her and slightly ahead, so she catches you in her peripheral vision;
3. Circle in and jump right into her path, smiling;
4. As she stops say, “Hi. I just saw you walk by, and I knew I’d be kicking myself if I didn’t come over and talk to you. You’re gorgeous”;
5. Lean back, look a little inscrutable, and say, “So… Who are you?”

If I hadn’t just seen it work, I wouldn’t have believed it. There seemed so much wrong with it when compared to what I thought I knew about women:

• You can just interrupt women who are going about their day?
• You can just tell a girl, right off the bat, that you think she’s attractive?
• Girls will just give up their phone number after a few minutes?
• And this is done… sober? With people walking past all the time?

I, and the other poor students, couldn’t process it. We felt like having watched a magic show and then the magician comes over and explains the trick. There were so many mental barriers that I couldn’t take it in, even though I’d already tried a few days talking to girls in parks and shops. I said to Johnny, “I find it difficult to open a moving target. It feels like they have their stuff to do and I’m just interrupting, getting in their way”. His response really stuck with me: “That’s tough to answer because it’s not even in my reality. I’m offering them the value, the opportunity to know me.”

This was a major shift in thinking. In the community we call it a “reframe”, a way of replacing a given interpretation of a situation with a new interpretation that is more favourable for you. From an early age boys are constantly drilled with variations of the same message—“You must earn the right to a girl’s intimacy.” In contrast, girls are taught to feel entitled to men pandering to them.

• It’s the knight who risks life and limb to rescue the damsel in distress;
• It’s the prince who must win over the princess;
• It’s the man who must put the roof over the family’s head;
• It’s the men who fight and die in wars to protect the women.

When a little boy cries because he can’t handle the pressure he’s told to “man up” and “pull his weight” whereas the crying girl is sympathised with and given “understanding.” This is just biology. Men give, women receive. It’s the extravagant privilege of being born with a vagina. Back in 2009 this seemed desperately unfair to me, whereas in 2014 I understand being born with a penis is an even more extravagant privilege… if you know Game.

Most men’s frame when hitting on girls is: She has the value, how can I convince her I’m good enough to put my penis into her magical vagina? Johnny believed the opposite—when he meets a girl he’s giving them an opportunity. Woah!

I wished I could internalise that belief.

Johnny went on to say that much of day game is about just creating the opportunity for the interaction. Some girls are going to like you, but if you don’t open then you don’t find out. You have to be in it to win it. These days we call this “flipping stones”, finding out which girls like you immediately based on a quick once-over. It’s an order of magnitude more difficult to turn around a girl who is initially uninterested, which is what I’d later get good at.

Johnny and Jimmy pushed me into six “sets” (new interactions with girls) over the next hour. I didn’t get any numbers but only one interaction was a crash’n’burn where a girl gave me an “eye roll” blowout. Lack of confidence and clumsiness of the execution hamstrung me, but I didn’t care. I found myself overly interrogating the poor girls with rapid-fire questions so much that one girl actually asked if it was an interview. The last two girls showed me engagement rings but smiled at my approach.

And then it was 2pm and all over. We all sat in a pub for a celebratory pint, telling our little war stories before the next night game session began. We had that manic glow of excitement, like having been shot at and missed. The main takeaway was that by the end of the session I felt as if I could do this. I could jump in front of moving girls and open. That was a massive improvement, the magic bullet I was looking for. My next seventy day game approaches were built upon this base.

I’d continue to practice night game, but the seeds were sown for my daygame career.

End of Chapter One

Next installment (Chapter Two part one) in three days. Balls Deep full book available in PDF here for £10 and paperback here for £20