She was really pleasant, asking me about the opener, and do I do this much. I was hyper-honest in what I said (though I withheld the sheer scale of my approaching and subsequent failure-rate) saying, “I’m a fairly direct guy. When a man approaches a woman it’s always based on a sexual dynamic. I see no reason to try to sneak in under her radar.” She suggested I could be a little more roundabout, like asking her something normal.

“Yeah, I suppose, but that’s not me. Give me some feedback then. How did you feel when I said that?”

She smiled again. “It was kinda shocking… but cool.”

Ever the motor-mouth, I continued, “It looked simple but there’s a lot going on there. When a man stops a woman he’s got to demonstrate value without scaring her or being creepy. It could’ve sounded really weird, but instead I was just putting the option out there. I wasn’t trying to persuade you to have sex. I put it out there as non-needy. I like sex, but I don’t need it.”

She was called Eugenia. We swapped numbers and after she walked off she called me two minutes later to check that she had the right number stored. She’d briefly mentioned a boyfriend in passing, and that she lived in Covent Garden. She suggested I join her in a bar after I was done in Tiger Tiger nightclub later that evening. We swapped texts the rest of the day:

Me: You’re still thinking about it 😉

Her: A little! Doesn’t happen often in London!

Me: But all the time in Greece? I’m at Tiger Tiger.

Her: Yea, Greece is a little bit different. I’ve just hopped into the bath…

Me: Bath texting? You’re weird

Her: Thanks… multi-tasking? lol. ur in a bar with ur mate and ur texting… that’s equally weird. lol

Me: Make sure you soap yourself properly.

Her: Thanks for the tip, couldn’t have done it without u. lol

Me: I’m helpful like that.

I later realised what was really going on in the subtext of this interaction. Girls have a dual mating strategy that is commonly summarised as “Alpha Fucks Beta Bucks”. This means they pursue both high quality male DNA and also long-term protection and provision. This gives the player his hack, his way in. Girls are hard-coded with the potential to step out on their long-term partners in order to access better DNA. They’ll call it an “indiscretion”, a “mistake” or an “adventure” but the important point is that it happens.

The London Daygame Model is designed entirely around exploiting this quirk of female nature. However, in September 2009 the LDM didn’t yet exist, and I didn’t know about Alpha Fucks Beta Bucks. My proposition to Eugenia had identified me as the consequence-free adventure sex guy and she was showing herself amenable to a secret liaison, with the usual trepidation and cautiousness before proceeding. I just lacked the wherewithal to pull it off. These days I’m all over it, but back then she was one who got away.

I left it for the week and then on Thursday a hot Colombian girl blew me out on an early evening date. I called Eugenia. She picked up right away and after a five minute chat she invited me to Bar Salsa saying her male friend was teaching there but she wasn’t dancing, so why didn’t I join her. I should’ve agreed, but I didn’t have the confidence to enter her territory and hold my frame. I envisioned myself being tooled by more charismatic men who know everyone in the class, being excluded from conversations she had with her friends and other silly social nightmares. It was a mistake. I should’ve just thrown myself into the mix to see what happened.

Next, while out the following day, I restarted, late on while I was in Cargo. The whole time I was trying to follow PUA text game advice, particularly the maxim from Roissy’s blog—send only those texts which you’d be comfortable having appear on a jumbotron in front of the whole world. Meaning, if you aren’t comfortable with your text game being public, it must be weak.

Me: Old Street tonight.

Her: I’m off to the cinema tonight but could meet up later if ur around.

Me: Yeah, that’s a plan. Text me when you’re done.

Her: OK.

Her: *later* Would you like to meet in Covent Garden or is it too late for you?

It was 11pm. I called. I said I’d be finished with my friends at midnight and then I’d call to arrange to go over to her place (she was home). Midnight came, I called and no answer. Twice. I texted, “hey” to no response. Fuck.

Next morning at about 11am I got this:

Her: Hey Nick – I’m so sorry about last night! I fell asleep in front of the tv, didn’t realise how tired I was.

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, in a speech by Brutus in Act IV, gives a beautiful conception of Alpha Fucks: “There is a tide in the affairs of men, which taken at the flood leads on to fortune…” Whereas the Beta Bucks guy is omnipresent with his provision of attention and resources (she was living with her boyfriend) the girl’s Alpha Fucks needs rise and fall like the tide—and specifically with her monthly ovulation window. She’ll only have a tiny window within which motive, method, and opportunity are aligned to sneak out for adventure sex. As a player you need to be alert for that and take her at the flood.

I’d missed my chance.

We arranged a date for later in the afternoon. I was already in town, sitting in Caffè Nero off Covent Garden reading Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead. I wanted to be in a state where I was self-amused and not anxious for her to come. Every date felt like entering a math exam and I needed to micro-manage my mood. She arrived and we sat outside in the sun. I was leaning back, trying to show “alpha” body language, and we connected instantly. I really liked this girl. She was smart, selfassured, and much prettier than I had first realised. It turned out she was a model and had recently has been posing naked for artists. She was also a dancer. We chatted a lot, and I kept with the authentic honesty.

This was still during the period of my voracious reading of all things seduction and psychological, so I’d also gotten a book on speed-reading people. We discussed that, and Eugenia really lit up when I outlined her character according to the book’s model.

She suggested moving on to St James’ Park so off we went. I initiated touch with upper arm touching, pulling her in with my arm around shoulders, and later around her waist. She pleasantly stayed comfortably close but didn’t respond by putting her arms around me. Again this was something of a calibration error. It’s generally a bad idea for the “secret sex” guy to be touching his girl in public—that’s exposing her to the risk of being caught, and undermining the whole secret society vibe. Except for fleeting moments to spike her energy levels, touching should be restricted to private environments.

I ended up talking about my interest in social dynamics and about the alpha/beta/omega male hierarchy, and sexual chemistry. She was going along with it all. I teased a bit, we joked. It was just very, very pleasant. I felt totally relaxed as if there was no judging between us, and I wasn’t trying to impress.

This experience would be the beginnings of a flavour I’d later successfully add to my pick-ups. I was trying to be as authentic and radically honest as possible, even overtly discussing the nature of malefemale interactions. This is now integrated into my instructional guides as “breaking the fourth wall” in which you discuss the meta-level nature of your own discussion. It’s highly effective in getting girls to quickly agree to sex, but in 2009 I was just fumbling in the dark with little idea it was to become a sophisticated tool. I’d recommend beginners avoid that stuff entirely.

Three hours in and we were sitting outside another cafe when I tried to escalate a bit more and fumbled a key test. While I tried to pull her in, she resisted, put down her sandwich and said, “You know I have a boyfriend?”

Ah, I thought. I’ve read a good answer to this on the Internet! I looked her dead in the eyes and with a low even voice replied, “I don’t care.”

The effect wasn’t what I’d hoped. She took a few bites of her sandwich then told me, “Well I do. It’s his flat I live in. I just don’t want to mislead you.”

I tried to keep a brave face, but I was crushed. I’d thought I was in. This was a beautiful, smart girl, a dancer, and the very first thing I’d said to her was a proposition for sex. And now I was in the friendzone! LJBF’d from the Apocalypse Opener… just let that sink in for a moment.

The reality was I’d had my chance and blown it. She’d asked me to walk with her a minute after my opening proposition, she’d invited me out to a bar, she’d invited me to her home late at night while her boyfriend was out (but fell asleep, at least that wasn’t so much my fault), and then accepted another date. Wannabe-seducers would likely interpret this story as her just being a games-playing cocktease who wanted to tool me for attention and, unfortunately, that’s the conclusion I came to.

But it was wrong. She wanted Alpha Fucks, and I’d come up short. Even at this last test about having a boyfriend, I’d misread it. She didn’t want to mislead me into thinking there’d be a relationship, but I’d misinterpreted her to be refusing sex and putting me in the friendzone. Even at that late point in the interaction if I’d had a stronger sense of entitlement and stronger escalation I could’ve taken control and got her into the bedroom.

Next installment (Chapter three, part three) in three days. Buy the full version of Balls Deep in PDF for £10 here or in paperback for £20 here.

It’s natural when recounting stories to focus on the success and compress all the boring bits so you can get to the highlights. That’s what good story-telling is and when out in the pub with your friends it’s a sure way to a fun night. When you’re telling pick-up stories this compression has a few side-effects:

1. It sounds like you’re having nothing but success;
2. The listener gets insanely jealous at the thought everyone is getting laid more than him.

People hate the idea that they’re missing a trick. Pretty much every spam email offer that lands in your inbox is based on this psychological quirk, and thus they promise you the ONE EASY STEP to lose weight/ get a bigger dick/make your first million/bang hot chicks. Usually it’s some kind of new underground secret that “they” (the powers-thatbe) don’t want you to know but, for a limited time period, you have a chance to discover the secret.

Funnily enough, they aren’t far from wrong. They are almost right, but for the wrong reasons.

Most men really are missing a trick with women, there really is a “secret system” (or more correctly, some simple principles), and the powers-that-be really don’t want you to know it. The part where the Internet marketers tell a rather fat lie is about it being one easy step. It’s more accurate to call it four years of pain and struggle.

But let’s consider the Availability Fallacy, which states that information which is readily available to you will be given a higher priority and loom larger in your mind than information that is less readily available.

Philosophy departments have been teaching this one in Informal Logic classes for decades. As it relates to pick-up, you’ll tend to over-estimate the victory stories people parade in online forums and marketing letters and under-estimate the failure stories that you may have to dig about for to find. I’ll tell you right now that in the time period covered by this volume of my story, I failed with over two thousand women.

One easy step

But unless I hammer the point home, you’ll forget that by the end of this chapter. You’ll focus on the lays and get the impression I was slaying right-and-left with wild abandon. Don’t say I never tried to convey the failure rate! So let me really drive home the point that game, for an average-looking man, is a grind. Failure is the base state and successes are rare blips that get creamed off to form the War Stories anthology.

I was hitting the streets every weekend throughout the summer and autumn of 2009 practicing the same direct opener time after time. On any given day I’d talk to between five and twenty girls, taking a couple of numbers and perhaps having an instant date (taking the girl onto a date immediately from the street interaction, without a break in between). Sometimes I’d get them out on dates later, but they’d go nowhere.

It was frustrating.

By September I hadn’t been laid for eight consecutive months, and I’d only kissed one girl. I’d probably spoken to about four hundred of them and had a dozen or so dates at least. It was always the same pattern— she’d turn up to the date quite keen and then gradually lose interest in direct proportion to how well she got to know me. They’d never seem to be in the correct position for me to go for a kiss and, if I ever tried to bridge the gap, I’d get artfully rebuffed. I pored over forums, books, and instructional videos but couldn’t get anything to work.

To be fair, there was no good instructional material out there for dates. The PUA literature that gave direct practical advice was focused entirely on the initial meeting in the bar or club. Once you had the phone number you were left to flounder with just a few simple highlevel principles. That’s all changed now, and there’s some excellent “date game” material that breaks it down to micro-level actionable advice. But in 2009 it was all shit.

The biggest problem, though, was my ineptitude. I didn’t have any confidence that I knew how to move a girl towards sex (“escalation”) and I didn’t feel attractive. I’d go on dates thinking I still needed to convince girls to like me and my lack of self-belief would seep out. I still had all the broken pieces jangling around inside, the after-effects of divorce. But I was impatient to get laid, so I kept reading, and eventually I stumbled upon a blog post describing the Apocalypse Opener.

The writer swore that this was a fool proof way to get laid. Just do it right with enough girls and one of them will bite. Okay, I’ll try it. I wasn’t lacking dedication. It goes like this:

Me: Hi, I’m Nick.

Her: Hi, I’m Girl A.

Me: What are you up to now?

Her: Blah blah, whatever.

Me: Would you like to come home with me?

The key (apparently) is to look her dead in the eye and hold your fucking ground. She’ll be taken aback and then scrutinise you briefly for any wavering. And then, sometimes, she’ll just agree.

Like most pick-up advice it’s really a part-completed sentence. The instructor says something like, “This really works” when the full sentence is “This really works… if you’re already the sort of guy who gets laid quite easily.” I tried it about twenty times and got nothing. Really, what did I expect? The most memorable of them was with a sexy Greek ballerina I had met walking outside the National Portrait Gallery in Charing Cross.

It was September 5th, 2009, Saturday afternoon and my mother was visiting London so I did the honourable thing and met her for lunch and coffee. I was totally open with her about my new hobby which she was obliquely supportive of. She was rather contemptuous of my ex-wife and viewed me as the aggrieved party. She’s also a psychologist and a realist so she wanted her son to get himself together and meet some girls. After she went off sight-seeing I met up with an Indian guy called Sai who had been winging with me recently to squeeze in an hour’s street work.

The very first girl I stopped was the Greek dancer. She had shoulderlength brown hair, slim muscular legs, and denim shorts. I got in front of her and opened:

“Hi! I had to stop you. You’re gorgeous.”

She smiled, muttered thanks, and I hit her with the ONE EASY STEP: “Would you like to come home with me?”

She smiled and said no. Ok, Plan B. “Um… okay. Is that coffee from Pret?” It was.

“Cool. I normally go to Starbucks myself. I like the coffee of the day though, to be honest, if I’m gonna spend a long time in a cafe I normally do Caffè Nero because they have those lovely distressed leather sofas… blah blah… bullshit.”

One of London’s great daygame beats

She invited me to walk with her, and we headed down to Trafalgar Square.

The next installment (Chapter three, part two) will be posted in three days. For the full Balls Deep in PDF for £10 go here, and for the paperback for £20 go here.

I put this little episode down to bad luck, like an aberration. A week later I met a Belfast native from the LSS called Paddy. He was a good guy, and I liked him. He was just a normal guy, not a weirdo like Diego, thank God. He always looked intense, I’m not sure why, but he turned out to be fun to hang out with.

Paddy and I decided to go out one night to a Shoreditch bar called Cargo. It’s an Indie bar, a really “hip” place with a noisy dance floor, beer garden, and bar area. The beer garden was great on a warm summer night. The club was crowded with university students and hipster chicks. By the time my friends Steve and Devak showed we were a pint to the good. Steve was the first guy who I had met on the boot camp recently, a nice guy from white Zimbabwe who had recently come out of a bad break-up. We remain friends to this day.

A great bar-game venue

We were all making the rounds, and as I was coming out into the beer garden I spotted two young black girls. It turned out they were Somali sisters, maybe eighteen and nineteen. The younger one was built really nice with a big ass and big tits. Her hair was long and she was just really pretty. Her sister was just okay, nothing special. Paddy had gone on ahead and was walking around the bar, so I start talking to the girls solo. I find out the hot one’s name is Hibaq. Her sister was Haweeyo. I doubted I’d manage to say that while drunk.

Steve joined me. I could tell that the hot one liked me. She was making eye contact and giggling at everything I said, so I suggested we go down the street to another bar called the Elbow Room to play pool. This is a technique called “the bounce.” It’s both an early test of the girl’s compliance to your leadership and also a demonstration of that ability to lead. If the girl is willing to follow you, she’s interested. These girls agreed. The Elbow Room is another pretentious status-whoring indie bar but I like the 70s retro vibe and pool tables.

A game of pool gave us plenty of excuses for casual touch. We would help the girls adjust their pool cue, line up shots and so on, allowing a touch of hands or soft, brief pressing together of bodies. Not much more advanced than the seduction techniques seen in a high school disco, really. Hibaq was letting me kiss her but, because of my hesitation and lack of self-confidence, she got away that night. I did get her number, and we’d texted for a while, but I could never get her to commit to a date. After a few weeks it just kind of died off.

About a month later, Paddy and I were out in Cargo again. We’d finally found a gameable weekend bar with that correct combination of pretty girls, open-plan seating, and music that doesn’t reduce you to shouting at each other in monosyllables.

We were in a crowded bar area, just behind the four-deep crush of revellers ordering drinks. A drunken girl walked towards Paddy and smiled. He instinctively put his hand out; I think originally to shake hers. She took his hand, and he pulled her in and just started making out with her. At this point I’d only kissed one girl in nine months, the Somali from a previous week. And here was Paddy making out bar centre with this girl that he hadn’t even met. They broke free, and she went to the toilets. He never saw her again, but I just thought it was so amazing. I asked him, “How did you do that?”

He grinned and said, “I don’t know, I just pulled her in for a kiss and it worked.” He was pretty proud of himself, and I was pretty impressed as well. It seems like a small thing now but this was the stage of wideeyed wonder newbie players go through. Remember the context—I was thirty-four years old, had never been good with women, and I still barely believed it was still possible for me to pick up a hot young girl. Even in my university years that would’ve been a memorable event.

As we were headed into the beer garden, I saw the Somali girls sitting at a table near the back. Hibaq gave me a guilty look, thinking I’d be mad at her for not replying to my texts. I played along, giving her a parody evil look and wagging my finger at her. She giggled. Game on.

Paddy and I went over to their table and chatted for a while before beginning to initiate what we call “mini-isolation.” This is when you get the girls to turn away so they’re not directly looking at each other. It’s a relief of the psychological pressure that often keeps a girl from otherwise doing things she might want to do if she weren’t being watched.

Paddy got the sister facing him, and they were talking. I grabbed Hibaq and pulled her up onto my lap. She was giggly and a little bit drunk. Her thighs were over mine with her lower legs dangling between. The left side of her ass was hanging off the side of my left thigh. I could have literally reached up and grabbed a handful of ass with my left hand.

I put my face close to her ear and started dirty talking. She was regaled in seductive tones about how great her tits looked and the risk they might be taken out right there and mauled. I told her I wanted to lick and roll her nipples between my teeth and nibble them softly.

This might seem like a strange time to bring this up, but when I was about two years old I had an ear condition that made me semi-deaf. By the time surgery corrected it I’d developed a stutter so I was sent to a voice therapist. It was a roaring success. Now I have no trace of a stutter and great vocal projection. That’s great for picking up girls. Loud and clear says confident and sure of yourself. That night, however, I happened to look up at Paddy as I dirty-talked and he was laughing. Pretty much half the bar was in on my conversation. The sister was sitting there with her back to us, acting as if she hadn’t heard a word, but squirming uncomfortably at occasional verbal embellishments of mine.

Hibaq was also squirming and giggling by this time and getting really horny. I slipped my hand up where her ass was hanging off and slid it under her skirt. I started fingering her through her panties and along the side where it was skin-to-skin. She loved it, and by then my hard-on was pressing against her ass.

I said, “Let’s get out of here.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I have to go home with my sister. We live with my parents, I can’t stay out.”

I had already checked out the bar. There was no feasible place to have sex without getting busted and thrown out. It seemed that first Game lay would elude me again.

“How about you suck my cock,” and she said, “Okay,” readily.

I took her hand, and we went up to the front door. At this time of night they were charging a cover of about ten pounds to get in. I asked the bouncer if we could get a hand stamp, go out, and come back in. The miserable bastard wasn’t having it, saying we’d have to pay to get back in. I said, “Come on, we’re just going to be like five minutes, have a really quick smoke and come back in.”

I was still a cubicle drone without any kind of cool vibe

He was likely fully aware he was cock-blocking me and just didn’t give a shit. I was suffering blue balls and pretty sure that if I could get her out in the alley for the blowjob, I could probably just spin her around and fuck her right there. What a story that would be—banging a nineteen-year-old large-breasted Somali in the alleyway behind a bar. But no, nothing doing. As I was to learn many times over in the subsequent years, fast lays live or die on momentum and if you come to a screeching halt it’s probably lost forever.

I went home alone. Hibaq and I texted on and off for a while, and then one night she messaged:

“Do you want to fuck?”

In hindsight, I should have been dominant and said something like “Kennington station. Nine o’clock. Best underwear and biggest smile!” But, I said instead, “What? Now?”

That reply just leaked weak conviction. Half an hour later and I hadn’t gotten a response. I called her and could hear her sister in the background. They were giggling and she told me it was a joke, her sister had gotten a hold of her phone. I didn’t really think that was the case, I’d just failed a test. Nevertheless, I never saw Hibaq again, and I’d have to go back out onto the streets to drum up more new leads.

Next installment (Chapter Three part one) in three days. Buy the full version of Balls Deep in PDF for £10 here and in paperback for £20 here.

The player’s journey is a lonely one. Since we first sit on our mother’s lap giggling and cooing, we are lulled into the comforting fantasy that people care about us. I used to think a mother’s love is the only genuinely selfless unconditional love in the world but even that is a fantasy. The reality is we are truly alone in this world.

The only person who will put your own interests front and centre is yourself. That’s a harsh realisation, and most of us spend a lifetime avoiding it, protecting all of those pretty lies.

I was never lacking a loving family, so forming secure attachments didn’t scare me. However, from around twelve years of age my best friend (and most popular kid in school) was uprooted as his parents took a job one hundred miles away. Suddenly I had no social coattails to hang on to and my slight weirdness was no longer shielded by a protective association with him. I gradually drifted out of the “cool gang” and into the “outsiders” group. And there I’d stay—first as a metaller, then a punk, then an anarchist, and finally an ex-pat.

So I’d always felt somewhat alone. I’d always had my little social group, but we were all outsiders. My extreme introversion compounded this fact, so I’d enjoy holing up in my bedroom watching zombie movies or reading voraciously. Then, at university, I started boxing. You’re never more alone than when you step through the ropes for a fight and the bell rings. Neither your coach nor your sparring partners can help you—It’s just you against the other guy.

Ironically, learning to seduce women is equally lonely, and we try equally hard to persuade ourselves it isn’t. In the beginning you believe you’re the only person trying this “game thing” and that you must be weird. You can’t tell your friends or they’ll laugh at you or pull you down like crabs in a barrel. God forbid you tell your workmates! There are online meet-up groups of like-minded men learning game but even then it’s more like a collision of independent particles than a bonded molecule. Even now, in a situation where some of my best friends are the world’s most prominent professional seducers, arranging holidays together is like herding cats.

So I just accepted that most of the time I’ll be alone in this journey. Even when with a succession of beautiful young women, I’m alone. I never quite give myself over to the pair-bonding.

In August 2009, not long after my first boot camp, I was yet to come to this realisation. I’d been watching instructional videos and reading textbooks on game, thoroughly immersed in my new hobby. I was already zoning out at work, physically present but mentally absent. My work became that thing to be finished as soon as possible in order to make time to browse the latest Game blog posts, and then I’d rush home on the Underground mentally scheduling the evening’s DVD fare:

• 7pm: Food, eaten on my sofa while watching Mind of Mystery.
• 8pm: RSD’s Flawless Natural.
• 9pm: Interlude to play video games.
• 10pm: Something from David De Angelo until his droning voice made me sleepy.

There was just so much material to consume, I felt I’d never get it. Imagine going to juggling school and the first class is how to keep six balls in the air. It was overwhelming but also exciting. For the first time in my life I felt like I had a real shot at dating hot girls. Once I’ve taken a bite out of something I’m as relentless as a lock-jawed terrier.

I hadn’t really gotten to know any of the guys from Sarge School (they’d later re-brand as Rock Solid Game, or “RSG”), the ones who I’d later become good friends with. I didn’t want to go out on my own without a wing man, and I was also searching for “kindred” spirits, I guess, guys who wanted to learn this stuff as badly as I did, or guys who I could learn from. Either way, I made the somewhat naïve decision that it would be a good idea to go in search of these people via an “underground” community of Pick Up Artists called The London Seduction Society. These men met online in what were called “lairs” to discuss the game and their supposed conquests of women. Hindsight is of course 20/20. At the time, I assumed it was an exclusive Members Only club of master seducers.

Oh, how wrong I was!

There was an approval process where I had to fill in an online contact form answering some questions before being granted membership to the forum. I actually worried they wouldn’t take me, thus carefully crafted my responses. What if they said no? Would I miss out on a oncein-a-lifetime opportunity to learn from London’s greatest womanisers?

One that got away, left

They let me in, and I posted on the meet-ups sub-forum for a wing-man to go out with. While nodding off during an interminable conference call at the office, my phone vibrated. There was a text message from an LSS guy called Diego Armando (the first two of the football star Maradonna’s full name, not his real name). He’s been hanging out in London, allegedly picking up girls, and asked if I wanted to meet. After work the next evening I was standing outside Liverpool Street train station watching the rush hour commuters fly past on their way back to the tree-lined streets of Essex. In the distance I spotted a shavenheaded Mediterranean guy with a grey polyester suit and awkwardly hurried walk. He introduced himself as Diego and my first illusion was shattered. He was quite a few rungs below RSG on the Coolness Ladder.

We started opening girls around the station, but nothing really went anywhere. I did get the number of a Spanish girl called Irati whom I ended up eventually getting into my bed wearing a Japanese schoolgirl outfit but, incredibly considering that circumstance, she was one of the ones that “got away.”

Before long Diego and I were in a nearby wine bar. It was a pretentious place, one of those where the wine is “reassuringly expensive” and it’s impossible to visualise any of the dishes merely from the menu description. Groups of work colleagues stood around unwinding over a beer before a train home. There were a lot of office girls, hence our presence. Low quality girls, according to my standards today, but my standards weren’t all that high back then. I was a little bit desperate.

Awkwardly trying to find my style and sociability

It only took a few minutes until I was chatting to a trio of girls near the bar, asking their opinions on Paris and New York to ease my way in. If I met them now, I would consider them as I do most office girls—too masculine, too chubby—but not having had sex for six months puts some urgency into the drive to get laid.

Diego waited until the conversation was rolling—the set has “hooked”, in the Game parlance—and then joined us. It seemed to be going pretty well when all of a sudden, inexplicably, he pulled a deck of cards out of his back pocket. A full deck of playing cards, and he started doing magic tricks. I was standing there slack-jawed in shock, wondering what the fuck this dork was doing. It was just weird. The girls were looking at him like he was a freak as well. One of them even said, “You really just happened to have a deck of cards in your back pocket?”

This was my introduction into the delusional and downright odd world of pick-up forums. Diego was trying to emulate one of the most famous PUAs in the world—Mystery, who was by trade a magician before he got into the game. Mystery was the star of a reality show on VH1 called “The Pickup Artist” and generally considered a father of the seduction community. The difference here was that Mystery is an actual magician. Diego was a mobile phone salesman for Carphone Warehouse. The girls rapidly lost interest and left. Nothing went right and the ill-fated partnership with Diego died that night.

Next installment (Chapter Two part two) in three days. Buy the full version of Balls Deep in PDF for £10 here and in paperback for £20 here.

My alarm rudely awakened me at 10am, and I rushed through my morning shower and breakfast with a spring in my step then arrived on time at the station to meet Johnny and Jimmy. After half an hour or so of Jimmy complaining that there were no hot girls around, Johnny went off and did a demonstration, plucking the phone number from a cute blond girl in five minutes or so. We were watching him from a distance thinking, “Is this really happening?” Then he sauntered back, phone in hand, grinning. We were dumbfounded.

Johnny would later confide that he was shitting himself. Jimmy was there to check out his game and report back to the team if he was good enough.

He pulled us to one side down a quiet street and taught us the basic approach, which goes thus:

1. Let hot girl walk past you, letting her put a few metres in front of you;
2. Chase her with a playful jog until you are alongside her and slightly ahead, so she catches you in her peripheral vision;
3. Circle in and jump right into her path, smiling;
4. As she stops say, “Hi. I just saw you walk by, and I knew I’d be kicking myself if I didn’t come over and talk to you. You’re gorgeous”;
5. Lean back, look a little inscrutable, and say, “So… Who are you?”

If I hadn’t just seen it work, I wouldn’t have believed it. There seemed so much wrong with it when compared to what I thought I knew about women:

• You can just interrupt women who are going about their day?
• You can just tell a girl, right off the bat, that you think she’s attractive?
• Girls will just give up their phone number after a few minutes?
• And this is done… sober? With people walking past all the time?

I, and the other poor students, couldn’t process it. We felt like having watched a magic show and then the magician comes over and explains the trick. There were so many mental barriers that I couldn’t take it in, even though I’d already tried a few days talking to girls in parks and shops. I said to Johnny, “I find it difficult to open a moving target. It feels like they have their stuff to do and I’m just interrupting, getting in their way”. His response really stuck with me: “That’s tough to answer because it’s not even in my reality. I’m offering them the value, the opportunity to know me.”

This was a major shift in thinking. In the community we call it a “reframe”, a way of replacing a given interpretation of a situation with a new interpretation that is more favourable for you. From an early age boys are constantly drilled with variations of the same message—“You must earn the right to a girl’s intimacy.” In contrast, girls are taught to feel entitled to men pandering to them.

• It’s the knight who risks life and limb to rescue the damsel in distress;
• It’s the prince who must win over the princess;
• It’s the man who must put the roof over the family’s head;
• It’s the men who fight and die in wars to protect the women.

When a little boy cries because he can’t handle the pressure he’s told to “man up” and “pull his weight” whereas the crying girl is sympathised with and given “understanding.” This is just biology. Men give, women receive. It’s the extravagant privilege of being born with a vagina. Back in 2009 this seemed desperately unfair to me, whereas in 2014 I understand being born with a penis is an even more extravagant privilege… if you know Game.

Most men’s frame when hitting on girls is: She has the value, how can I convince her I’m good enough to put my penis into her magical vagina? Johnny believed the opposite—when he meets a girl he’s giving them an opportunity. Woah!

I wished I could internalise that belief.

Johnny went on to say that much of day game is about just creating the opportunity for the interaction. Some girls are going to like you, but if you don’t open then you don’t find out. You have to be in it to win it. These days we call this “flipping stones”, finding out which girls like you immediately based on a quick once-over. It’s an order of magnitude more difficult to turn around a girl who is initially uninterested, which is what I’d later get good at.

Johnny and Jimmy pushed me into six “sets” (new interactions with girls) over the next hour. I didn’t get any numbers but only one interaction was a crash’n’burn where a girl gave me an “eye roll” blowout. Lack of confidence and clumsiness of the execution hamstrung me, but I didn’t care. I found myself overly interrogating the poor girls with rapid-fire questions so much that one girl actually asked if it was an interview. The last two girls showed me engagement rings but smiled at my approach.

And then it was 2pm and all over. We all sat in a pub for a celebratory pint, telling our little war stories before the next night game session began. We had that manic glow of excitement, like having been shot at and missed. The main takeaway was that by the end of the session I felt as if I could do this. I could jump in front of moving girls and open. That was a massive improvement, the magic bullet I was looking for. My next seventy day game approaches were built upon this base.

I’d continue to practice night game, but the seeds were sown for my daygame career.

End of Chapter One

Next installment (Chapter Two part one) in three days. Balls Deep full book available in PDF here for £10 and paperback here for £20

Way back in 2001, Mystery had moved out to Los Angeles to hit on the local women. To cover his rent and feed his ego he’d begun teaching other men his system. Back then, instructional events were always seminars held in hotel conference rooms. The “guru” would stand in front of twenty or more eager students and just… talk. Perhaps write on a flipchart. And that was all!

No evidence. No demonstrations. No interactivity.

The students were supposed to just accept the instructors at face value without the slightest shred of proof that they were any good with women. It was a time of outrageous charlatanry. Mystery’s great innovation was to conduct his instructional events “in field” by going to real bars and hitting on real women, providing a live demonstration both of his method and also his skills. For the time, it was revolutionary. He called it a “boot camp” and typically they were held over a weekend with seminars in the early evening and then the in-field session immediately afterwards.

I wanted to take a boot camp. In my naïveté I projected mythical levels of “mad skills” onto professional instructors and desperately wanted just a little of their awesomeness to rub off on me. An hour searching google for the main PUA companies brought me crashing back to earth. Jesus Christ, £2,000 for a weekend with Real Social Dynamics.

I mean, I want to get better with women. But… £2,000?

It wasn’t cheapness on my behalf. If I was guaranteed success with beautiful young women I’d have handed over my credit card, date of birth, and mother’s maiden name. Empty my bank account all you want, Master PUA, so long as I get to tap top-class ass! There was no lack of desire in me. Rather, I doubted my ability to survive the weekend without a mental breakdown. They’d push me hard, and would I stand up to it?

So I wanted to dip my toe in the shallowest end of the kiddie pool. I looked for the cheapest boot camp I could find, telling myself I’d just see what happened and, if it was okay, I’d spend the big money on the premium guys. This was stupid. Now that I’m an experienced teacher I see this half-assed attitude all the time. People are always half-assing the important decisions, and so was I.

I was stupid, but I was lucky.

There were only a handful of companies offering live events in 2009. The big names would fly in a couple of name instructors every month or so (LoveSystems, Venusian Arts, Real Social Dynamics and so on) but charged well north of £1,000 for the privilege. There was the local big fish PUA Training that seemed to have the slickest package but wanted £800. Towards the bottom of the food chain was PUA Method, charging £300, but even to my novice eye I could see they were clowns.

And then Sarge School was charging £99. A couple of London forum guys gave positive reviews and when checking out their crappy website, I thought they looked cool on the photos. Okay, that’s the kiddie pool for me. It was poor decision-making exemplified but little did I know how much it would affect my life.

I filled in the online application form for the next “beginners” boot camp in July. The following day I got an email for someone calling himself Jimmy Jambone (everyone in the community has a pseudonym, partly due to ego and partly because there are many, many haters who try to destroy you if they think you’re getting laid). He was to become one of my best friends over the next three years and my first Game mentor, but at this moment he was just a guy whose reputation intimidated me.

“Hey Nick. Thanks for your inquiry and booking. It’s great that you’re taking positive action on this path. We’ll send out a detailed email in the week before the boot camp giving you all the necessary information. But for now, feel free to ask any questions. JJ.”

I was too scared to ask anything. I felt like a man caught in a river flood looking up at the rescue helicopter, stretching out a hand to my rescuer. I was determined not to let myself down on the weekend and studied my books extra hard and read the Sarge School site from top to bottom. Two days before the fateful day an email arrived couched in secretive tones. We were to meet outside Borough underground station whereupon an instructor would collect us and take us to the seminar venue.

So at 7pm on Friday evening I made the short walk up from my house. Four nervous men stood in a huddle, furtive-eyed near the Underground exit. That would be the other students. I introduced myself. There was a Polish guy, an Italian, a Scot, and a white-Zimbabwean called Steve. The latter would be my first wing over the next couple of months until he ended up with a serious three-year relationship. We chattered excitedly, and then the instructor arrived.

He was a young guy called Johnny. Nicely dressed, confident manner, and a deep cool voice. He led us away to a nearby pub/Thai restaurant for a couple of hours’ classroom teaching. There was a sense of adventure in the air, like anything could have happened and probably would. Johnny put us at ease with a mix of aimless chit-chat and probing a few personal questions with genuine warmth and interest. Another preconception about Game was being dispelled.

I’d assumed the men who are good with women were all aloof arrogant swine. I assumed they’d lord it over me and seem impossibly far away from my position, unable to relate. Johnny was the opposite. When he spoke to me he turned his body fully towards me, looked into my eyes, and oozed understanding and rapport. This is how good seducers are. They make you feel good about yourself in a very authentic way. They aren’t “playing” you. This is crucially important when talking to girls because not only do they usually need to feel comfortable around you before they can surrender to sex, but they are also extremely good at sniffing out inauthentic and fake behaviour.

Arriving at the dilapidated old pub it was empty but for the Sarge School guys playing pool and chilling at the bar. Seven guys in all and every single one exuded cool. I was encountering a real live “rat pack”, a group of men who had actively worked upon their value and knew how to support and reinforce one another. This was not the clueless ill-coordinated rabble that I called my own friends. It was a class apart, and I was already sold. First up, a charismatic black Londoner called Diamond gave a talk on the basics of Game, including how to “open” in a bar by asking an “opinion opener.” That’s as simple as it sounds—you ask girls for their opinion on an interesting question. At this time Sarge School was using this one:

“My friend is going to take his girl on a trip to propose. He’s wondering where to go. Which is more romantic, Paris or New York?”

It sounded a bit lame, but it was just an ice-breaker. If the girls want to chat they’ll run with it. And if not, no big deal. They can give a curt answer, and you can eject without feeling bad. Remember, I was in a bad way at this time, just five months after the love of my life had walked out on me. I was still broken inside, lacking any kind of selfconfidence. Diamond went around the students in turn asking them what they wanted from Game and women. I was almost choking up when I replied:

“I think if a woman gets to know me, she’ll love me. I just don’t know how to get her that far.”

Yeah, I was pretty low back then. I think Diamond swallowed down some of his own vomit hearing such woe-is-me-ism.

The night went as good as I could’ve hoped. We decamped en-masse to Piccadilly Circus doing warm-up sets on girls in the passing throng outside the bars before heading inside. Diamond was my assigned instructor that night and kept an eye on me, encouraging me, giving feedback, and demonstrating on girls. He seemed so cool and friendly. I felt a warm glow of gratitude that he so expertly guided me through such a stressful evening. I ended the evening with the number of a Moroccan-English girl from Jewel Bar. We swapped texts but she never came out on a date. Around midnight our energy was flagging so the instructors let us go home with an admonition to sleep well and meet up at Borough Station at noon the next day for the day game session.

The scene of many an RSG bootcamp

Life is full of bifurcation points, moments when you’re at a fork in the road (wittingly or unwittingly) and the smallest accident or slightest whim decides which direction you take and yet that radically changes the course of your life. I’d already had a few of them:

• Picking up The Lay Guide one day in HMV, purely from idle curiosity. It had been a choice between that and Killing Pablo. That made me aware Game existed.
• Choosing Sarge School rather than a different company. It had ultimately rested upon a chance recommendation by an anonymous forum member I had never met. That decision would end up protecting me from the various charlatans that often derail a would-be seducer’s earliest steps.
• Johnny was actually the newest member of Sarge School. My boot camp was also his audition with the company as an instructor, and he’d been brought in because he’d begun to build a local reputation as a daygamer (all the other SS guys were night gamers). This would be the first ever SS daygame session.

Thus, the second day of boot camp would prove pivotal. I’d be introduced to a workable method of daygame. It was primitive, suboptimal, and became rapidly outdated but it was something. Had I been left to aimlessly wander parks asking girls what they were reading (“going indirect” in the jargon) I’d have likely given up on day game within a month or two. Instead, this was the second step in what would ultimately lead me to being the world’s top daygame instructor and theorist. A bifurcation point indeed!

Next installment (Chapter One part four) in three days. Balls Deep full book available in PDF here for £10 and paperback here for £20