I’m lying in bed at noon, tapping away on WhatsApp conversations and trying to rouse myself to action. There are a few parallel conversations running. I’m sorting out the afternoon’s daygame plans but toying with ideas of lunch first. The Three Stooges R’s (Roy, Ricky and Mr R) are still in town but Ricky is leaving imminently and wants to have one last big night out. SevenDG is visiting for the weekend so he’s with us. [1]

Aside from the usual text game with girls I’m also canvassing opinions and schedules of the VIP Inner Circle of Euro Daygame [2] to decide which city is next on my list. I’m halfway through the Moscow trip and getting tired of all the rain. Plus there’s the usual daily updates demanded by Little Finger, my British friend in Belgium. He takes an unnerving glee in all things squalid about the life and appears to be positioning himself as the central clearing house for filthy stories and gossip. Sometimes I feel like my real role on jaunts is as his intelligence asset, scraping up stories of filth, squalor and hubris that he can add to his Rolodex.

“Are you not doing nightgame?” he prods, hoping to manipulate me into getting drunk, disgracing myself, then telling him the story the next day.
“Not my thing. The others are well up for it though. All they do is drink” [3]
“RVF-talk is that Gypsy and Icon are where the action is at” he counters. “Give it a go”

I’d been to Icon the previous summer and was thoroughly unimpressed. I can see why the forums like it, because with certain prerequisites, it appears to be pussy paradise. What are those prerequisites you ask?

• You are used to chasing skirt in the Anglosphere, South America or South East Asia and haven’t yet acclimatised to the vastly superior quality in Central and Eastern Europe. You still think a six is an eight because you just haven’t seen the real top end of skirt.
• You haven’t yet developed the experienced player’s ability to X-ray a girl to determine how hot she really is. You’re still blinded by make-up, tight clothes, heels, and dark lighting. [4]
• You need to get drunk before opening.

I find that nightclubs in the FSU are simply not the place to find the hot girls. If I was to estimate the pecking order of where to find the hotties I’d say it’s as follows, starting with the best:

1. Nice cafes in the affluent part of town. The problem is these girls teleport into them and aren’t seen outside of their huddle at the table.
2. Nice malls selling brand name clothes. The problem here is the girls arrive in taxis or flash cars, walk around in pairs with a best friend, a parent, or a sponsor. There’s also very very few of them to be seen any given day.
3. University buildings at kicking out time. You need to time these places for the ends of lectures. The problem is the girls are nearly always in groups, there’s lots of peer pressure even on solo girls, and the universities are often nowhere near the other good daygame spots so there’s tonnes of dead time.
4. Normal daygame in Old Town, normal malls, central parks, and busy shopping streets. This is the only place you get decent footfall but suffer a quality-per-vag drop-off compared to the top three places. On balance, it’s still the best bet overall.
5. Bars not frequented by tourists. Usually you have to go a bit outside the main areas for them but rarely more than one metro stop. The problem is the girls are usually in social groups and there’s very few sets over the course of the night. Also, quality is skewed towards girls who like to drink, who are rarely as hot as those who don’t.
6. Nightclubs that tourists would know about. This is where Icon and Gypsy fit in.

The single biggest problem with these kinds of clubs is the calibre of girls in them. Almost exclusively the age skews upwards, probably averaging well over twenty-five, and the tourists attract scammers. Arena City in Kiev is a good example of that: the entire complex exists to let ageing women scam Turks and forum chodes out of drinks. If you look good, you might get picked for free but don’t count on it.

So, back to Icon…….

We pound back beers at our favourite dive bar by Kamergirsky then take taxis towards the riverside bar area where the clubs are. We end up in a nice bar overlooking the river and I bump into a blonde I’d number-closed a week earlier. More on that in another post. We soon stumble over to Icon and I’m blasted by the godawful dance music. Aside from that, it’s lively and there’s some decent skirt. We all start opening. Let me tell you a little about Icon so it makes sense.

After walking in you are in a long lobby area lined with sofas and a bar at the end with some stools. It’s the only quiet room in the club and it gets footfall because every girl walks through it to enter, again to leave, and the toilets are just outside it’s connecting door to the first dance floor. It’s as close as you can get to bar/street game in a club that doesn’t have an outdoor smoking balcony. We spent nearly all of our time there because you can open without shouting.

The next room is a large dance-floor with a long bar, upon which a couple of semi-naked women dance. It’s rammed on weekends with about 60/40 men-to-women. You can just about talk if you really raise your voice but it’s mostly dance-floor game in the middle, or talk-into-the-ear-of-a-wallflower game around the edges. I number closed a pretty synchronised swimmer there but mostly had conversations-to-nowhere. This room is where all the men trying to get laid ply their craft. It can get a little wild.

Finally, accessible only by running the dance-floor gauntlet, is the “here for the music” room where the worst possible electronic dance music plays at full volume with accompanying strobe lights. It’s where the “DJs” play [5] and vacuous fools stare at them. It’s also where the VIP tables are so expect to see fat old men pouring vodka from a bottle for nicely-done-up girls who then dance on the spot at the edge of the area.

I ended up drunk

It was a night where all the sets blur. At any moment I could look around and see at least three of my four companions working a set, usually by the bar. We picked up momentum and the girls were usually game for a chat. Numbers were collected. For me, the only number that went anywhere went like this…..

I’m standing kicking my heels by the bar in the quiet room when two girls stream past. The one who catches my eye has incredibly good hair: thick, black, glossy, and literally to her ass. It shamed most shampoo commercial hair and I doubt I’ve ever seen better. She also had a bright orange dress and black heels. Without seeing her face I catch up with her.

“You. Stop. Two things”
She smiles. She must have at least some English
“First, you have amazing hair. I love it. Like a shampoo commercial.”
She smiles again. Dare I say she shifts her hips and settles into giving me a shot.
“Second, your dress. You look like a tangerine rolling down a hill. I just saw a blur of orange.”

I see she’s actually ethnically Korean, though born and raised in Moscow and tells me she’s never been to Korea and can’t speak the language [6]. She even has a Russian name. Let’s call her Natalia.

She’s entirely self-composed and starts chatting with me, giving some gentle banter and encouraging me to keep trying it on. Out of nowhere a drunken Mr Arr comes in and starts using loud code-words to indicate it’s his set because he’s number closed her on the dance-floor an hour earlier [7]. This presented a tough judgement call. On the one hand, wing rules determine that whoever opens the set owns the set (and thus it’s his set). On the other, we’d all been spamming the club so there wasn’t really any set discipline. At this point it was just a quick chat so I decide to back out. I let Mr Arr run the conversation and I mostly look away, staring at other girls and looking for the right moment to leave. It doesn’t come for a minute or two because every other friend is in a set.

“You stopped talking” says the girl.
“Yeah. Wing rules” I mutter absently-mindedly
“What rules?”
“Wing rules. He chatted to you first, in the other room, so I must gracefully withdraw.”
“Oh”

Finally Roy comes out of his set so I join him and knock back a whiskey. Twenty minutes later I’m pushing through a pack of locals on the dance-floor as I’m doing a circuit of the club to eye up fresh talent. I squeeze past Natalia from behind. Her friend sees me, taps her and points me out.

“Oh hello again” she says. “How is your night?”

I’m drawn into conversation for about thirty seconds then escape. Not before she’s rested her hand on my forearm and give me a strong look. I continue on and probably open a couple more sets over the next half hour.

It’s getting late and now more girls are leaving than entering. I’m back in the quiet room at the bar when Natalia and her friend come past, going home. She turns and gives me a big smile and a wave, then seems to pause. I have a difficult judgement call.

Being drunk and horny, I resolve the conflict in my favour. There’s a subtle shift in cosmic karma as the gods of daygame inform me that it is, indeed, my set now. I go over and take her number. An hour later I’m wandering through central Moscow with SevenDG as we both bang on about the pleasure of the Player’s Journey, then I get some sleep.

More to follow.

If you like the idea of running around chasing skirt during the daytime you really ought to read my book Daygame Mastery. Until I release Daygame Infinite, it’s the best there is.

[1] I may be garbling some of the details here. One reason I’m blogging this stuff now is to get it written down before my memory fades entirely.
[2] Yes, that’s facetious
[3] A little unfair. All Roy does is drink. Mr Arr is fuelled more by an obsession to never quit. One sentence I’ve never once heard him utter, “you know what lads, I think it’s time we called it a session and went home”
[4] I am interested in fucking the girl, not the dolled-up costume avatar of the girl, nor the shared-with-your-friends-on-whatsapp Instagram oil painting of the girl
[5] I refuse to speak of DJs with anything other than utter contempt. The emperor has no clothes.
[6] Nonetheless, I’m forced to score this one as a gook. Sadly.
[7] Which I hadn’t seen or been told about until now. He’s telling the truth, though, and Natalia confirms it.