UPDATE: When Tom’s family have approved of a memorial project / hosting of his material, I will post it here. Until then, note any fundraising or giveaways of Tom’s material are not approved by his family and are pirate sites. I’ve deleted all comments on recent controversy to return this post to 100% tributes

It has come as a shock to us all to learn that one of the OGs of daygame has passed on. Rather than gossip and conjecture on it, I’d like to spare a few minutes to remember Tom. We spent a lot of time travelling together and collaborating from 2011 through to 2015. He was a co-creator of the London Daygame Model that has served us all so well. Many of my readers were deeply touched by his work and inspired by the personal example he set.

For me, personally, I’d have never reached the heights I did without Tom beside me- sometimes as friend, sometimes as rival- matching me every step of the way, both of us grinding through adversity to try to out-do the other.

Tom Torero will be missed.

I first saw Tom on Shaftesbury Avenue opposite the old Forbidden Planet at the bottom of Covent Garden’s Neal Street in early 2011. He was on the other side of the road, walking away from an attractive girl (presumably a set he’d just finished). My wing pointed him out, “That’s Tom Torero!” He’d already gained a reputation on the London Seduction Society forum from all the lay reports he’d post, often with photos. The man was a daygame machine.

I wouldn’t meet him until a few months later when his friend and wing Anthony Hustle reached out to me suggesting the three of us have some beers and hit the streets together. Those were exciting times, running around London like excitable puppies humping the legs of whatever women walked past. By now Tom was hired by Andy Yosha at Daygame.com.

Andy’s company was a big deal back them. THE big deal. His marketing program reached thousands of men outside of the community and gave them their first taste of street game. Andy and Yad had been front-and-centre of Daygame’s coaching and promotional materials but now wanted to step back. Tom (and his pal Jon Matrix) were the natural successors. I remember hanging out one morning with Tom when Andy called up and asked him over the Daygame HQ in Marble Arch for a meeting. We all went to a small Caffe Nero and while I kept a discreet distance slurping my coffee at the counter, Andy took Tom to one side and explained he wanted Tom to be the public face of Daygame.com

“Mate, you’re perfect for the job. You’re literally a teacher by trade, you can do good daygame yourself, and you’re a never-ending machine for producing content,” Andy enthused.

Tom would prove him correct in every one of those statements.

All of us fondly remember the perpetual content machine that was Tom Torero. At first it was his weekly hosting of the Daygame.com podcast recorded in the Marble Arch HQ. And then there was all the YouTube content. So much great content was dropped on Andy’s channel. Before long Tom and Jon had a product released, the short and elegant Date Against The Machine. This was the first- and still one of the best- video instructional programmes to provide real in-field footage of every teaching point. People liked it. I liked it.

By 2013 I was Euro-jaunting with Tom.

He was considerably more adventurous than me and I remember commenting to him, “Tom, you’ve always felt the call of the wild. You’re an adventurer at heart.” He’d asked me to feedback on a draft of his Torero Travels memoir. Although ostensibly a pick-up memoir about shagging women, you couldn’t miss the central (but unstated) theme: Tom had spent his entire life finding ways to step out of the ordinary, mediocre routine of life and to instead find a way to do something exciting. Whether it was sailing across the Atlantic, sledding with huskies in Finland, or checking out a second-tier Slavic city (“Mate, this unknown Siberian town has two universities and it’s only a 17-hour train ride from Moscow. See you in two weeks.”) it was all motivated by the same thing: Tom’s unquenchable thirst for adventure.

We daygamers are all familiar with the popular euro jaunt spots: Kiev, Prague, Warsaw etc. There are some cities were Tom was literally the first English-speaker to ever approach a hot, slightly-vulnerable looking student and suggest that though he’s literally just seen her, he’s noticed that perhaps her fashion isn’t quite right but, yeah, she does look quite nice and, hey, why chat here when there’s a café just ten metres away where they could get out of the cold. Every time Tom had a hare-brained scheme to check out the 4th-largest city in Estonia or whatnot, I’d always tell him, “Let me know if it’s any good and I’ll join you.”

I lived by the maxim “it’s the second mouse who gets the cheese.” Unlike myself, Tom liked to step into the unknown and then trust he’d figure it all out soon enough.

One of my best ever daygame trips was April 2013 in Minsk. Tom had gone two weeks before me and spoken so enthusiastically of it that I immediately marched down to the Belarusian Embassy in Kensington for my visa and was meeting Tom at the Minsk Central Bus Terminal a week later. We absolutely tore it up that trip. “This is like Ocean’s Eleven,” he said with his cheeky grin. “We’re robbing the casino in broad daylight.”

By 2014 Tom and Jon left Daygame.com and started their own businesses. Many of my older readers will remember 2014 as the Golden Era of daygame content creation. Tom and I competed to out-produce each other all year and finally, in early 2015, we thought “fuck it, let’s just do a product together”. Beginner Daygame was done at Tom’s impetus. He’d been teaching primary school children for years before his transition to daygame and he had a unique gift for breaking down concepts (often interminably complex concepts that I’d dreamt up) into bite-sized teachable units. I was happy to just explain things in books. Tom wasn’t satisfied with that. He wanted our ideas inside people’s heads in a way that they could use. In this sense, Tom was daygame’s best-ever teacher.

Perhaps this was his greatest contribution to the community. Nobody could drill the London Daygame Model into a new student’s head as smoothly or quickly as Tom. I doubt he’ll ever be surpassed in this area.

We all remember the flurry of new content Tom released to his YouTube channel in 2014, including the first run of his monumental podcast. He’d taken the lessons learned as the face of Andy’s company and ramped it up to the next level. Tom’s 2014 video output has aged extremely well and remains some of the best pick-up content out there. It used to astonish me how consistently he could produce. Every week there was a new video. It also quickly became apparent how much care he lavished upon the production values.

I fondly recall his lifestyle videos with the slick opening montages set to music, where Tom would be in god-knows-where doing god-knows-what but still finding time to hit up all the local women. His euro-jaunt lifestyle videos gave men a window into what was possible. No, you don’t have to just go to your call-centre job every day, get an M&S ready meal on your way home to your rental flat in MIlton Keynes, and watch telly all night. Every single one of us- so long as he’s prepared to pay the entry price of hard grind on the streets- can become an adventurer like Tom.

This was inspiring to literally thousands of men. I’ve met lots of them, men whose lives have been profoundly changed for the better because they had the good luck to click on their first Tom Torero YouTube video. Tom didn’t just want to live a life-less-ordinary. He was passionate about sharing his findings with others.

I have many great memories of my time with Tom. One comes to mind here. We were sitting outside Boutique restaurant on Republic Square in Belgrade in May of 2014. It was a gloriously sunny day and we’d both rattled a hot young woman each the night before. We ordered big beef steaks with peppercorn sauce and potatoes, cold beers, and were now digging into it. Both of us were then living primarily on passive income from our daygame products.

“Mate, this is the life,” he said. “Sun, travel, birds, steak. This is what I always dreamt of.”
“We live in a golden era,” I agreed. “To do this in earlier times, you’d literally have to be a prince, or heir to a large fortune. Even Napoleon didn’t see as much of the world as us.”

It was one of those we’ve done it moments. Tom nodded, raised his glass, and we toasted the euro jaunt lifestyle. Even then we didn’t realise just how many men would come to find their own way of living their dreams overseas.

I’ve shared some of my reminisces about Tom here but let’s also spend a moment considering his abilities. Tom was an exceptional daygame practitioner. Let’s face it, he wasn’t blessed with good looks or athletic prowess. He made girls like him because he worked very hard shaking the tree and had a real gift for engaging patter. Tom had the single most important quality for any successful daygamer: a personality. In spades. Add in his analytical mind, his work ethic, and his single-minded ability to power through adversity and it’s really no surprise he shagged literally hundreds of women. Tom didn’t just do daygame, he also innovated concepts to improve the model, taught his clients, and was perhaps the single biggest contributor to the “culture” of daygame through his podcast, lifestyle vignettes, and memoir series.

History will be extremely kind to the legacy of Tom Torero.

Back in 2011-2015 I kinda took for granted just how good a crop of coaches and content producers the London daygame community had. Looking back, this was the golden era. Tom was a key figure in this explosion of productivity and his materials have withstood the test of time. He was just one man but he bequeathed us a huge legacy.

“Oh to reach the point of death and realize one has not lived at all.” — Henry David Thoreau

Tom really lived. He had enough adventure for several lifetimes.

I miss you, Tom. I’m very glad I knew you.

I welcome all my readers to share their own thoughts and memories of Tom in the comments below. Please be respectful and stick to his life, his community contribution, and his impact on your own stories. This is not the place to gossip or conjecture on his death or to revive controversies. I’ll be monitoring my spam and pending queues to make sure lurkers and first-time commentors can leave a word or two.