I’m a logical, disciplined man reared on book reading and video games. I also spent a large portion of my adult life working in finance and learning martial arts. This encouraged me to develop an incremental linear meta-view of the world.

A meta-what????

Ask yourself this – how does one progress or achieve in life?

Most people of my fuddy-duddy generation were brought up to think we are tortoises rather than hares. The fact that parable is so well understood proves the point that it’s heavy in the zeitgeist. We have been taught that success is about plodding on with smart, persistent hard work and as you continually endure and overcome setbacks, you make your long march towards progress.

• Work nine to five in an office and keep building up the experience and skills to earn that next promotion.
• Study for your exams, learn formulae, answer practice questions under exam conditions and then you’ll eventually pass.
• Hit the gym four times a week, do your reps, slightly increased the weight each time, and your body with grow strong and ripped.
• Hit the streets three times a week for your 10 + 10 + 20 daygame sets and after enough grinding the lays come through.

But is this actually how we progress?

I don’t think so. Now, I don’t want to take the opposite end of that caricature and recommend the “lottery ticket” strategy or fatalistic Magical Thinking. There’s undoubtedly value in grim determination and persistence – even talents like Floyd Mayweather Jnr will put the hours into bagwork and jump rope. It’s a necessary condition but not a sufficient one. Real progress often comes down to two steps:

1. Recognising a rare opportunity
2. Jumping on it

[You could add an earlier step of “making your opportunities” too but that’s what targeted grindwork is meant to create]

Much of success comes down to smart decisions taken at key moments, when the combination of hard work and lucky fate throw up a bifurcation point. How many football games have been won and lost because one player spotted an opening, made the run, and was in the right place when the ball ricocheted off the crossbar? How many boxing matches have been won not due to a steady build up of jabs and body shots but by trapping the opponent into walking onto that one home-run left hook? How many battles have been won not due to steady attrition and tactics but by one innovation or one general’s courageous decision taken on the field of battle?

Most of the women you see on the street are not going to fuck you. Just not going to happen. They don’t fancy you, or they are taken, or they are in the wrong mood, or they are against meeting strangers, or everything works out great and then logistics intervene. Failure is the natural persistent state of Game. Players are really looking out for two things in a girl:

1. She’s available
2. She’s into you

Some guys have such high SMV and their ping range so wide that (2) is frequently satisfied. However blog readers are well aware I have no interest in looks-matched age-matched “game”. Even the David Gandys of this world have a narrow pool of available/into-you from which to draw if they are red-lining it towards the upper limit of their quality ceiling. Aiming high forces scarcity onto everybody.

So how does this relate to daygame strategy?

In poker you will lose almost every hand. You’ll fold most hands at the very first deal because your two cards simply aren’t any good to pursue. Even if you bet to reach the Flop, you’ll fold most flops. That’s the smart strategy because it costs chips to play a hand. If you’re always trying to get involved, you’ll just burn through your stack. An aspiring poker player must control his urge to play everything.

Compare this to a typical office, factory or service job. In those roles you have a linear relationship to each task. Maybe you process passport applications – you begin the day with a stack of them and then work through steadily, each taking approximately the same time and mental energy. Each incrementally earning that paycheck. Maybe you install widgets in an appliance assembly line – again it’s steady even work that steadily earns your paycheck. Same with serving diners or checking in hotel guests. It’s the tortoise steadily moving towards the finish line. Slow and steady wins the race.

Poker players do not incrementally increase their winnings. It’s feast or famine. There are a tiny number of hands where you can win big so you must identify them and play them perfectly. You lose often, so make sure you lose small. You win rarely, so you’d better win big and scoop a fat pot. A key skill in poker is to keep your losses small so that you still have enough of a stack to play the rare good hands correctly.

Daygame is poker. Almost every girl is a No, but every now and then you’ll meet a girl who is available and into you. That’s when you bring your stack into play.

It doesn’t really matter if you’re fucking 1-in-20 opens or 1-in-100. The important point is that even with fantastically (I’d say suspiciously) good ratios like 1-in-20 you’re dealing with the reality of 19/20 (95%) of opens being a road to nowhere. You need to identify these No’s early so you don’t whittle down your Vibe Stack on idates-to-nowhere, text-hell, and time-waster-dates. That’s the daygame equivalent of betting too long on a losing hand. Just like you can only bring so many chips to a poker game, you only have so much enthusiasm for daygame and it will eventually wear out and require time-off to replenish.

The whole time you are looking to identify that rare set that could win the entire pot. That’s a real skill. That’s how daygame is played at the strategic level.

This is why you should never spam approach. That’s like a poker player on tilt. A spammer is a blind idiot who bets every hand without checking his cards, running the maths, or watching his opponent’s betting behaviour. He’s not really playing poker at all, he’s doing a mechanical empty caricature of it with none of the craft. He’s pissing away all his chips on hopeless hands until his stack is gone. Even the most aspy nerd incurs emotional costs in daygaming and by spamming he is massively increasing the amount of failure.

This isn’t the “every failure takes you a step closer to success” where you judiciously choose your sets and learn from them. This is more like “every failure takes you closer to a meltdown and giving up the game entirely”. When you give in to the temptation to spam you are switching off your brain and losing the ability to read signals. The sets just blur into one another as if they are more widgets or more passport applications. True art is not made by throwing paint at the canvas and no football team wins a World Cup by shooting every single time they get the ball.

You need to go out and you frequently need to grind, but don’t ever think that x number of sets will lead to y number of results. Sets are not widgets. Grinding just means you are sitting at the poker table, putting in your ante, and waiting until you get a hand worth playing. That’s when you really turn the game on, like the hare turning on a burst of speed.