It’s pretty rare for me to fuck up a set. Let me be precise over what I think constitutes “fucking up” rather than simply failing to bang a girl. The harsh fact of the Sexual Market Place is most girls are never going to bang you no matter what you do. It’s initially quite a sobering experience to realise just how many women find you completely unattractive. I dare say there are three billion females alive today who would never take seriously the thought of me banging them.

Three billion. That’s a lot of rejection.

I see Game like famous football analyst Alan Hansen see’s defending: it’s a percentages game. In every situation in which you find yourself, you have incomplete and imperfect information. With that information you must make a decision over what to do (e.g. pull the trigger now, or build more comfort). In these situations there is usually a smart percentage play, and also a high-risk-high-reward play [1]. So a smart player will usually do the smart percentage play but sometimes take risks if he’s able to absorb increasing chance of failure, needs a Hail Mary, or just doesn’t much give a fuck at that point in time [2].

Playing the smart move (or the calculated risk) and then failing to get laid is not fucking up. The dice roll sometimes goes against you, and we are dealing with a deck mostly stacked against us.

Fucking up is when you don’t even know the smart play, or even worse, you know it and do the dumb move anyway. This story is about the latter.

I’m walking down Kamergirsky late one evening with the Three Stooges. We head up the incline past Cuba Libre and I see three girls sitting on the benches outside Let’s Rock bar next door. The blonde one looks nice, a high seven. We walk past then I decide to give it a try so I walk back to them, holler, and get into a chat. She seems to like me. My friends wait at a discreet distance for the five or so minutes it takes me to get the number, telling her we are going off drinking.

Having spoken to her, I don’t like her much. She’s lived in California a year, acquired a slight valley girl accent, and seems extremely pushy. The kind of girl you’d turn your back on if she was a six. Nonetheless, I’m in this to get laid and it’s more slop for the sausage machine. Also, sometimes five minutes isn’t long enough to really figure someone out.

I ping her within minutes and she’s very enthusiastic, sending me long messages with short response times wanting to meet up immediately. However something still seems a little off. She seems a bit disconnected and is bringing friends. I can’t yet tell is she’s being social-not-sexual and thus a time-waster, or if she’s just a bit aspy, or if it’s the lots-of-friends party vibe. This is how I thought at the time. Reading back the messages later, I see that I miscalibrated.

Miscalibration is the surest sign of an impending fuck-up.

She seems pretty keen, no? This is all good behaviour from a girl and no bullshit. However, I’d fixated on her breezy tone and her “yeah, let’s hang out” casualness to think she’s probably a time-waster friend-zone deal. It’s not how my lays usually begin. I’d failed to adequately appraise myself of her personality and her time in America (and desire to imitate US girl’s communication style), plus I was primed to filter excessively hard because I’d just had a girl waste my time on a go-nowhere date that same afternoon. Anyway, Blondie rolls up to Let’s Rock with two friends about an hour late and I briefly go outside to chat. They are carded and not allowed in.

At this stage I still think she’s uninvested. It feels more social than sexual, and she was an hour late. I keep drinking in Let’s Rock with the Three Stooges. I conclude she’s just looking for foreigners to drink with and thus deprioritise her. So, I’ve already set the foundations for a fuck up. I keep messaging and again, reading them back now I wonder where I got such silly ideas from. She’s playing it straight and yet I’ve convinced myself she’s dicking me around.

We arrange to meet in our favourite dive bar. Now there’s a curve-ball outside my control. Roy, GG, Mr Arr and myself are all sitting in the basement around a high round-topped table. There’s one other free table in the bar, another high round one right next to us on my side. The girls arrive at precisely the time Roy is outside having a cigarette. Not having seen Blondie up close, he doesn’t know it’s my set and he opens her. He’s pretty good at game and she seems to like him.

They now come downstairs and Blondie sits on the opposite side of the spare table from me (but side-by-side with my friends) and her brunette friend on the side next to me, almost side-by-side to me. This is good for eye contact with Blondie but too far for kino. The big problem though, is her friend is completely isolated on the corner. The only people she can speak to is Blondie or me. Anything else requires her talking across us. This will become significant in precipitating my next error.

I try to bring brunette into the conversation. She’s very talkative, interesting, and seems to fancy me. No-one else talks to her (they can’t without getting up and walking around to stand next to her) and when I talk to others she just sits there looking like a third wheel. My friends don’t try to hit on Blondie but she wants to talk, so she talks to them. I can feel the momentum dying. Roy plays it aloof because he doesn’t want to hit on Blondie but the very fact of doing that, in a conversational vacuum, makes her want to talk to him. He tries to escape a few times to smoke outside but….. she’s a smoker too so she follows him out on the cigarette breaks. The couple of times I do talk to Blondie she motor-mouths prattle. So, it’s shaping up badly….

1. Seat positions force me to be monopolised by Brunette, or look rude in de-facto excluding her.
2. Blondie can’t just listen. She has to talk, so she fills the vacuum by talking to Roy.
3. They end up sharing smoking breaks.
4. I can’t bear to hear the prattle Blondie is spilling. It strikes me as valley girl-esque narcissism.
5. And did I add that my friends somehow think Brunette is my target and I have to text them that Blondie is? Being daygamers, they don’t immediately see that “talk to the obstacle and create demand from the target” is standard Mystery Method bar game [3]

You can see where this is leading, no?

There were all sorts of solutions. I could’ve explained ahead of time or on the fly how I intended to play the set (including soft freeze-outs of Blondie). I could’ve found a pretext to change the seating arrangements. I could’ve put more energy into dominating the table so all eyes are on me. I could’ve asked my wings to go to another bar and leave me to it. There were any number of solutions but I instead chose to fuck it up. Oh, and I was a bit drunk by now too.

When Blondie came back in I struck up more conversation and then she gave me a big speech about how she’s an amazing social butterfly and she can get any man she wants. Rather than see that as fronting over low self-esteem and thus something to neg and then divert, I instead thought “fuck this pompous bitch, I’m gonna try fucking her friend”.

So I texted our WhatsApp group words to the effect of “I’m switching to the Brunette. Blondie is now fair game”. This was late on, so only Roy was really in a position to make a play. He put in a half-arsed effort and then as we all kicked out around 2am Brunette told me she was a virgin and gave me the brush off.

The girls lived near Roy so took that as a pretext to get a cab to his apartment in Arbat where he kissed both, then eventually threw them out for playing games. I went home and tried to figure out where I’d gone wrong, so having a 4am WhatsApp debrief with Roy to express our mutual frustration and bafflement [4]. If I was to put it all in simple terms I’d say the dynamic was this:

She liked both me and Roy. I got first dibs and made a mess of it until she ceased to like me. When the ball was turned over to Roy he did a better job and nearly got the lay.

 

If you like stories of me fucking up promising sets and then my wing nearly banging them, you’ll love Balls Deep because that happened plenty with Jimmy.

[1] Not unlike investing, stand-up comedy, fighting, or any other number of human endeavours that require compliance from the world to succeed.
[2] For example if a girl has middling interest in you, the smart play may fail to sufficiently raise her interest in you above the crucial threshold so suddenly the high-risk move is more attractive due to reduced opportunity cost of trying it.
[3] I stress my wings were not trying to steal my set. This was just a colossal fuck up of bad luck, bad communication, and poor judgement from myself. It was my job to run the set to my advantage and I failed to do so.

[4] Sharp readers will have observed from the screen caps I took today that she’s typing and I have unread messages. While screen-capping I decided to send a ping for first time since that Moscow weekend. She got right back to me. Interesting.