“I cannot forecast to you the action of Russia. It is a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma; but perhaps there is a key” Winston Churchill, 1st October 1939

There was something in the air during my October trip to Kiev. A couple of months earlier I’d taken my first trip out and been reasonably impressed over the ten days – nice city centre architecture, lively atmosphere, pretty girls, decent reactions on the street. However I’d come away scratching another location off my quest for Pussy Paradise. In some respects it was like sitting in the front row of a Victoria Secrets catwalk show – just because hot lithe girls are parading a few feet away in tight clothes does not mean you’re any closer to fucking them than if you were in an igloo in Greenland watching it over a flickering TV signal. I fucked a very hot 17yr old but she was an extreme outlier. Eddie fucked a pretty girl and she was also an extreme outlier. My other (anonymous) buddy fucked a MILF and she was also an extreme outlier. Tom had been a few months earlier and done the same thing.

Sigh, yet another game of “find the outlier”.

Things were different in October. For a start it was cold and rainy, so the streets never had that lets-just-hang-out-because-it’s-fun-to-be-here vibe for the hot girls and the men who chase them. Most of the time the girls were hurrying to be somewhere and trying to keep their street time to a minimum. Gone were the summer days of girls just sitting around on kerbs eating ice cream, gazing absently into space. It also meant that being on the streets took a little out of us because it was so cold.

You’d think that would translate into a shitty daygame trip, but no. It was weird.

For some reason I’d accidentally sprayed on Pussy Catnip and my experience was like the fantasy of the Lynx deodorant advert. For the first five days I was constantly IOI’d. Any given day I’d get at least thirty of them, some of which were head-turning tongue-hanging-out mong looks from younger-hotter-tighter girls. Pretty much every set hooked strong and my phone rapidly filled up. I thought to myself, “Jesus fucking Christ, I’m going to smash this town!”

Alas, it was not to be. I was instead about to get a lesson in the iron self-discipline of Ukranian girls in sticking to their boyfriend script. If Warsaw/Krakow metrics applied, I think I’d have gotten laid every single night of my trip. Instead I banged two new girls. Both hot, both young but also both a pain in the arse to close*. So I was getting half of Pussy Paradise:

Warsaw: Few IOIs, few hotties, but all of them are dirty whores ready to go fast.
Ukraine: Many IOIs, many hotties, but all of them patient value-extractors taking it slow.

It was like getting served a cup of tea without the milk and sugar. What’s the point of that? [or for Americans, it was like getting peanut butter without the jelly]. Many thoughts went through my mind during the first week of the trip. Once the initial disbelief at my reactions died down, I thought:

• This is what it’s like to be Steve Jabba, where literally half the girls in a town get wet just looking at you. I can pick and choose my opens according to who I like best and gives the strongest IOI. No need for a cold approach.
• It wasn’t like this in August
• Why can’t it always be like this? It’s so easy and so much fun.
• What is different that’s causing such a change in pre-open IOIs and the solid hooks?

My brain was working overtime to figure out if there was a way to bottle the magic. By the second week when the flaking epidemic hit, I was wondering if there was in fact any magic to bottle, or if it was fools gold. I still don’t know the answer but I do know the reactions were so extreme and so consistent that there was something different going on. Now I must stress that my end-result laycount was no different to a normal trip. Two girls in three weeks. That’s at the low end of what I consider a decent trip. In Serbia and Belarus trips I’ve trebled that before without resorting to barrel-scraping. Here are my unstructured, unpolished thoughts on what might’ve been going on.

1. I’d gotten back into the gym and gained about eight pounds of muscle in 2015 while keeping body fat constant (a bit fat, but not fatter). While in August I had to wear t-shirts and shorts due to the heat, in October I could layer up with a leather jacket so I gained all the advantage of the muscle mass without any of the disadvantages of looking a bit thick around the middle. So, a girl’s initial once-over to clock my body shape was more favourable now.
2. My fashion was back to my Overkill style – leather bike jacket, open shirt, t-shirt, accessories, jeans, leather boots, hat. It really stood out against the local men. I literally didn’t see anyone who dressed anything like me. So, my shiniess worked better in cold weather.
3. My vibe was absolutely glowing. From the very first day I was in a great mood and the constant stream of good reactions and IOIs just snowballed it. I felt extremely attractive. It felt like walking into a nightclub knowing you’re the best-looking guy there. My cold approach game has been honed through five years of being sexually invisible until I open my mouth. It was nice to play the game on easy mode like a good-looking guy and my vibe responded to create a virtuous spiral.
4. My face and body language were extremely open and pure. I never felt like I was wearing a mask or trying to project a certain emotion. I just walked around feeling great and let that radiate outwards. It felt like I’d been carefully cleaning and polishing the lense on my movie projector for years and now it was time to spool the reels and see an image projected with perfect fidelity. Non-players don’t appreciate that this isn’t “being yourself” or “dropping game”. It’s the opposite. Rejecting game / behaviour modelling / identity change means you just lazily whip out your dirty cracked lense and expect the audience to be happy with the shitty image on screen.
5. I always followed the principles of my game, but I frequently abandoned the prescriptive model. I’d open girls by shouting at them from ten metres away: “Hey you! Miserable looking girl with the black coat. Stop!” (that was a catwalk model idate – but went nowhere). I’d open by pointing and not saying a word. I even opened three sets. Nothing mattered because I was in full flow and riffing off all the lessons I’d internalised.

But of course despite the unbelievable strength of my initial reactions, things dropped off sharply when it came to getting laid and I was right back to the usual results. Why is that? The major drop off came in two stages. Almost every girl replied to my feeler text but very few came out on dates. Frustratingly, many would keep up a fun flirty exchange, send me (not dirty) photos and then literally just not reply when I sent the date invitation. A few girls messaged me things like “I’m on Khreshatyk street now, let’s meet!” and then when I replied “Ok, outside McDonalds in 15 minutes?” they literally didn’t reply for several days. The other major drop-off came on the date when I went for a kiss. Incredibly, I only kissed four girls, and three of them ended up naked on my bed. The rest rebuffed the kiss.

This is what I think. Again, I’m not sure. The whole experience was like Bizarro World where nothing meant the same as it would mean in any other city I’ve been to.

1. I was plugging directly into a girls hindbrain on the street and frying her circuits. This meant I was getting massive attraction from No Girls just from the power of my presence. They’d love it, lap it up, and then return to No Girl status when they cooled down back home. As I write in Daygame Mastery, good street game will make timewasters out of No Girls that would simply blow out a guy with shit game. That’s why you should always be highly suspicious of men with high number-to-date ratios. They are doing pure Yes Girl filtering, punching below their weight.
2. My extreme shininess was inducing No Girls to let themselves come out for coffee Day 2 / idates as a diversion to their otherwise routine lives. Many of them had study, homework and part-time jobs so they really don’t do much else any given week. The girls would enjoy the date, thank me for coffee, and go back to their lives unfucked. They knew if they tried to extend it to a second date they’d have to start putting out because I’d subcommunicated my unwillingness to be strung along. So they cashed in their small winnings rather than risk getting fucked while trying to increase their stack of attention chips.
3. That same shininess and horniness is why the text exchanges dropped off. They loved the process until the moment they were forced to get off the fence. Being conflict avoidant, girls would rather ghost you than give an overt “no thanks” reply.
4. A bunch of girls were attracted to me and available but they wanted a boyfriend. I quickly formed the impression that Kiev girls are either gold-digging bitches (a tiny proportion overall, but vastly more than in any other city) or straight-laced village good girls. The date became a subtle frame-control battle where they held out for me to audition as boyfriend and when I refused, they disengaged because they’d rather have nothing than have casual sex with a stranger. It was all at a I-know-that-you-know level. I set out my stall and she decided the product warranty wasn’t comprehensive enough. I was unwilling to invest additional time in D3s, D4s etc because once the freshness of the first hour with a new girl wears off, dating bores me now. I’d rather just play a video game.

Kiev has a reputation for being a tough city to get laid in (for free). I can go along with that. Most reports are that you get a ton of harsh blow outs while filtering for the rare outlier Yes Girl. I can believe that too. It never happened to me but I saw it happen to most others. I think I reached a higher level of failure – almost non stop good reactions and getting my eventual “No” further down the line.

So, based on my two trips I’m rating Kiev about the same level as Belgrade in that it’s painful and demoralising for beginners (stick to Prague or Berlin guys), a ton of work for rare but decent reward for intermediates, and an addictive mirage for advanced guys who get to sit front row for the Victoria Secrets show close enough to smell their panties but not able to sample the goods as much as you think you’re going to.

I’ll solve the puzzle. For now I’ve opened the enigma and unwrapped the mystery, but the riddle remains.

* I define “pain in the arse to close” as “didn’t display willingness to jump into bed with me two hours after we met”. These days, if I get any kind of resistance to my escalation I switch off and lose interest. I can’t help it. I think it’s my subconscious trying to tell me to stop being a player. I’ll write about it sometime because I think this is probably the biggest negative impact on my 2015 results – I rarely give a shit about the girl in front of me and she smells it. While I still really enjoy the street (probably due to the constant novelty of each girl), everything else gets boring if it doesn’t go exactly my way on exactly my timetable.  It’s probably some kind of notch-fatigue. Like Jimmy said to me recently, “Nick, you’ve fucked enough girls.”