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

20th May 2009 was to be my big day. This was when I’d decided to begin day game. I took the underground in to Covent Garden and my hands shook. My skin was clammy. It was a glorious day, and I was shitting myself because so much was at stake. In my mind this was my one chance, my Last Chance Saloon for happiness with women. If I couldn’t make Game work, I was fucked. And not in the good penis-invagina way. This is how it happened…

I’d just been sitting in a Caffè Nero re-reading the Mystery Method hardback that arrived from Amazon a week before. I was reading about new concepts to me such as survival and replication value, indirect openers, the three-second rule, and other such technical terms. My mind was reeling with the sheer amount of new information and the underlying world-view that states women are an abundant resource that you pro-actively go and hunt for. There was even a glossary of jargon where Mystery had put names on to commonly encountered situations. Things like:

“Approach Anxiety”—that gut-churning sense of dread deep in your stomach that you feel once the idea of talking to a new girl moves from idle possibility to immediate probability. “AA” and I were to become intimate bedfellows over the next few years.

I was definitely shitting myself. I stayed in the comfy sofa-chair much longer than I needed to as the little demons whispered in my ears, trying to give me reasons to give up and go home. Nonetheless, I finally roused myself and put on the figurative PUA Wizard hat. I began my walk through the market towards Neal Street, entering the bustle of a shopping afternoon. Several hot girls walked past and I did nothing. No way did I have the balls to open a moving target.

After twenty minutes with my hands in my pockets, beating myself up for not approaching, I tried another tack. Finding a less intimidating environment, I walked into a retro clothes shop. I really liked Japanese girls at this point, more so than any others. I’d also had this lingering belief that told me I should focus on Japanese girls because I speak Japanese and, thus, they’d be impressed, giving me an “in”. There was a Japanese girl browsing some trousers. Hmmm, I’ll need a prop… I picked up a shirt, took a deep breath, and walked over to her.

“Hey. Do you think this shirt suits me?”

She smiled and told me it looked nice.

I kept talking. My mind was blank, my heart pounded, and my hands seemed to shake. I was actually talking to a hot girl I just “opened”!

A few minutes of jibber-jabber dribbled out, and she was not running away. I did some clumsy touching by using her hand to draw a map of Kichijoji (a sub-region of Tokyo) when it turned out we both knew the area. I tried way too hard to build rapport. I was totally un-calibrated and asked her to go for coffee within two minutes. She politely refused. I ejected.

So I ended up with nothing, but I was so fucking happy! Totally stoked. I’d just approached a random girl and didn’t get destroyed.

Obviously, I had to find another retro shop, thinking if it had worked in one shop maybe it would in the next. I wandered into Rockit, another retro clothes place tucked in a cobbled back alley behind the market. Dusty Springfield’s voice lilted over the air as the speakers pushed out I Only Want to be With You. At a circular clothes rail by the back wall there was an okay-looking English girl rummaging through the German army coats. I blundered in clutching a hastily grabbed shirt and tried the same opening line. I got a polite answer, brief small talk, but she didn’t hook. No doubt I was sweating, shaking, and had my lips pulled back in a rictus grin. I probably terrified the poor girl. Whatever, I was on a roll!

I was really excited, adrenalin flushing my veins and distorting all sense of perspective. I was elated that I had spoken to two girls without traumatic incident. Hey, do you think I could approach a girl in a different type of shop? Come on Dixons, let’s see what you have! I saw an American girl looking at some cameras over the counter. I walked up from behind (always a no-no, but I was socially clueless at this point in my life). I tried to be casual.

“What you thinking of buying?”

She jumped, visibly shocked. Then she calmed down and replied, “Uh, that one.”

Total failure. At first she looked at me like I was a mugger and then as some low-value un-calibrated tool. And she was right, so I muttered an apology and departed. I shuffled out of Dixons and crossed the road, walking down towards Embankment and the river. A really hot Malaysian was coming up the street towards me. I stepped across her path a bit and gestured.

“Are you someone I should get to know?”

Even now, years later, I cringe as I write that but I think it conveys just how low my social intelligence was in 2009. At heart, daygame is a test of how socially normal you are. No matter how slick your lines they must be overlaid onto a sound foundation of social skills. Girls sniff out weirdoes in a heartbeat, which has proved the undoing of many a hapless new daygamer. At this point, I was that hapless daygamer.

Fortunately my social intelligence was so low I didn’t realise how low it was. I was filled with a beginner’s overestimation of how quickly he can “get it”. That delusional overconfidence would serve me well in powering through the daily grind and endless rejections. If I’d been more socially savvy I’d have probably abandoned the project as an impossible dream.

By late afternoon on the 20th of May 2009 I’d approached four girls. No numbers, no success, but I’d controlled the one thing that can be controlled—my own behaviour. I’d started.

At that point it was still not in my reality to stop random girls in the street, interest them, and then get a phone number.

Another week of work passed. While my body was physically present in team meetings and PowerPoint presentations my brain was elsewhere, turning over the latest information to be gleaned from my instructional books and the PUA blogs I’d been finding on the Internet. It was like a whole new world had opened up in front of me—there were actually men on the Internet who wrote journals detailing their
attempts to seduce women! It was like discovering the Necronomicon. Perhaps I, too, could learn these mystical incantations that will make women feel uncontrollable attraction towards me.

“Nick!” barked my manager and my mind snapped back to the job. “Nick, have you cleared review points six and nine from the work papers?”

I muttered an unfocused reply and began plotting my next toilet break, to sneak away with The Mystery Method for a furtive read. Eventually it was the weekend again.

1st June 2009, and I was now loitering in St James Park. I was wandering around the park looking for any girls sitting alone. I floundered for a while, nerves shaking my limbs, so I sat in a deck chair reading a book. It was pretty tempting to stay there, but I forced myself to approach.

There was a cute brunette sitting with her little lapdog. I walked over and stroked him, going to my haunches so I wasn’t towering over her. I said I liked her dog, what breed is she, etc. She responded, but she was just being socially polite. There was no interest. Really, I was trying too hard to find any kind of flicker of interest from her, but I was nervous and subconsciously looking for an excuse to eject before my ego got battered by rejection. The conversation stuttered and died after two minutes. She didn’t dismiss me, I just bailed. My legs were still shaking.

I saw a colourfully-dressed girl sitting on the grass reading the Economist. I opened with, “Hi. What’s that you’re reading?” She responded pleasantly in a French accent, and we chatted. I was so nervous I was just wittering on about the magazine, France, and doing the twenty questions routine, trying too hard to fill the space. I sat down and she didn’t flinch, but I had no idea what I was doing. Even though she was continuing the conversation I felt out of my depth and contrived to eject at the earliest opportunity. That was it. Two conversations and I was spent. The anxiety had drained me, and my legs felt weaker than they used to after a two hour kickboxing session.

The next day I wanted to try walking around Soho. This is the entertainment district in Central London, packed with trendy cafes, bars, pubs, and all manner of media offices. Pretty reliable for there to be some pretty women walking around. I was off work, and I started strong. Boarding the train at Kennington there was a hot Asian seated listening to her iPod and doing Sudoku. I bottled it initially because there was a random guy next to her, and I didn’t want to risk being rejected in front of him (I still haven’t internalised the, “I don’t care what anyone thinks of me” mantra, so I was feeling what we call the Spotlight Effect which is the erroneous belief that you are centre of attention). Luckily she changed train at the same station as me. I planned my exit to end up slightly ahead of her on the escalator so I could turn over my shoulder:

“Hey, I’ve always wanted to know, is Sudoku really Japanese?”

She replied, “Um, I’m Korean.”

“Pangapsumnida.”

She smiled at that so, emboldened, I continued, “Yeah, it’s just I used to live in Japan, and I never saw them play Sudoku. I think it’s probably one of those things they say is “big in Japan” because they know nobody is gonna prove them wrong.”

We chatted, she got the same train connection as me and, as she sat down, indicated for me to sit with her. Famed PUA Mystery seemed to be speaking in my mind that I should affect disinterest so I stayed standing but next to her, not giving her my full body language. I struggled a bit for conversation, and I knew I had to get off in two stops.

“Hey. I’m getting off in a minute. If I wanna see you again what do I do?”

She didn’t seem too convinced. “Um, take my number.”

I took the number and we ended up swapping about thirty texts, but I couldn’t get her out on a date. Re-reading the texts now with the benefit of hindsight I realise my text game was awful but for now it was a victory story—my first ever daygame “number close”. This was an early little reference experience for changing my reality towards that of the kind of man who picks up girls in the street.

Flush with the rush of success, in true noob fashion, I proceeded to kill the opener (stick to the same opening line too long) by doing it on another four Japanese girls that afternoon. One pair of tourists hooked really well and chatted, but I was lacking direction and ran out of steam.

I was pleased with myself for hitting the streets and making things happen, no matter how incompetently. There was a pleasure from taking action and bringing my sex life under my control (or at least the illusion of control). It would’ve been easy to just stay home and play the latest Call of Duty, yet, here I was stalking the streets in a constant battle against my own anxiety and negative self-talk, and eventually getting some work done. That said, I knew I was clueless. It was time to find someone better than me to give me direct training. So I opened my laptop and searched the Internet for a PUA boot camp.

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

I met my wife in late 1999 at a London bar on a normal Friday night after work. I was training as a finance professional with a top tier City firm so life was quite stressful but full of optimism about my future career. My university friends, Tim and Yasin, were now highly-paid computer programmers and worked nearby for an investment bank. So when 6pm rolled around we’d have a few beers. Young professionals enjoying that great city of opportunity for new graduates.

We stood outside Brown’s wine bar by the Bank of England surrounded by other blue-shirted office drones sipping lager. A few pints later we were in an old man’s pub in nearby Old Street. Tim was playing the slot machine by the door and hit the jackpot just as the door opened and three Japanese girls walked in. My head turned as I heard the put-put metal cough of the machine dumping coins into the collection tray and my eye caught the middle girl. Very pretty.

Enveloped in a drunken haze I did something I’d not done since late night in student nightclubs—I walked up to a girl I didn’t know, tapped her on the shoulder, and hit on her. Incredibly, it worked. She gave me her number and then three dates and two weeks later I was fucking her. Six years after that we were married.

Of course, a lot happened in between—me living in Japan for four years as first a high-school English teacher then later as a fight journalist and a kickboxer, her joining a professional dance company and touring the world as a performer—but that’s just boring “origins” stuff. Let’s just get to the main point.

I was with my wife a total of nine years and for the first eight of them it was perfect. Like a Disney romance movie. We had holidays together in Thailand, Turkey, and Tunisia. We moved in together in London in 2006, and I really thought that was it. I’d found the love of my life, we’d have children, and we’d grow old together. Job done. Now I just had to mature, settle, and be a good husband.

It started to go wrong in early 2008 when she got antsy about giving up her dance career to have children. She’d been putting me off for two years with the excuse, “I want more time as a girl, before I become a woman,” and I was starting to doubt she’d follow through. She was also showing reticence in moving to Newcastle with me to buy a house and settle. Then she decided she wanted an office job after two years as a housewife. There’s blame on both sides and it doesn’t really matter now but, suffice to say, 2008 was strained. She changed, I changed, and the marriage was strained.

happily married and thinking it would last forever

With the benefit of hindsight I should’ve seen it coming. She went back to Japan in January 2009 for two weeks to visit family. On the day she was due to return to London—nothing. The next day she called me from her friend Andrea’s house and said that she wanted to meet me after work. I felt my stomach drop. I couldn’t believe she’d leave but my body knew what my mind wouldn’t contemplate.

Even now, over five years later, the image of her walking towards me down the street outside my office is burned into my mind. We sat down in a pub and she told me she needed space. That space became separation and ultimately divorce. I was against it and did everything I could to convince her to stay. Again, hindsight is 20/20. She did us both a favour, but it would be well over a year before I’d see that.

She’s happily remarried now (to a former best friend of mine from university—a long story!) with two children. We’re still on speaking terms though we rarely ever do speak. She chose her path after divorce and I chose mine. And here the path began—single, loveless, frightened, and broken inside. I felt like a glass vase had been shattered and now rattled around inside me.

I remember lying on my sofa in a squalid little two-bedroom flat in Kennington, Xbox360 controller in my hand as I played Battlefield Bad Company. I’m a video game nerd and a sucker for first person shooter games so this should’ve been a perfect evening’s entertainment. But I couldn’t enjoy it at all. Everything seemed so dull and pointless. My life seemed dull and pointless. I turned the game off, shut my eyes, and did some serious introspection.

What was so wrong? Why was I so unhappy?

Hiking with my brother a couple of months before the separation

My university friend, Charlie, had gotten divorced six years earlier and never remarried, or even had a girlfriend. He’d foresworn women (which didn’t take much as he was hopeless with them anyway) and dedicated himself to scuba diving trips around the world. I knew intuitively I couldn’t do that. It was giving up. I’d never quit anything in my life.

So I had to get a new girlfriend. I wanted sex. I wanted companionship. But how could I do it? I’d had a short experiment with online dating as soon as I’d recognised my divorce was final. Match.com had resulted in one date with a mid-thirties English woman who turned out to be rather fatter than her profile pictures suggested. I’d fallen back on my old “in”—Japan—and signed up for JapanCupid.com but that led to three uncomfortable dates with post-thirty girls I didn’t fancy.

Then I cast my mind back to a book I’d read some six or so years earlier called, The Lay Guide, by a man calling himself Tony Clink. It was a paperback in the HMV book collection in amongst the rock star biographies and Hunter S Thompson diaries. That had been my introduction to the Seduction Community, a guidebook on how to get laid. I’d read it and compared his advice to my own successes and failures. While not remembering much of the book’s content, I did come away with an overall favourable impression. I’d thought, “I can see that working.”

But, of course, I was in love with my soon-to-be wife at the time. My job was already done. I didn’t need that stuff. Until now.

So as I laid back on the sofa with my eyes shut I started idle speculation. Could I become a pick up artist? Could I walk into a bar and leave with a fistful of hot girls’ phone numbers then get them out on dates the next week. It didn’t seem very likely for an average-looking thirty-five year old man. How was I going to compete with all the good-looking guys, the rich guys, the young guys? Last time I’d been to a nightclub I felt completely out of place. I felt old, and it seemed everyone else was having more fun than me.

Nah. No chance.

But perhaps I could use it to get a nice girlfriend. A pretty late-twenties girl would be fine. Maybe she would fill the void in my life and I could go back to what I’d been doing.

It should be quite obvious that my mind-set was all wrong. I wanted an easy solution without having to change anything significant in my life. I was refusing to learn the main lesson of my wife leaving me— that something was a bit wrong with me. We’ll get to that as the book progresses. I avoided learning that lesson for a long time.

Four days later the brown cardboard Amazon package thumped onto my doormat, and I had a fresh copy of The Lay Guide. I read it on the toilet at work, devouring every page. I was determined to give it a try. I’m pretty earnest when I commit myself to a new hobby (and this was basically to become a hobby). For the previous two years my hobby had been global economics (I shit you not!), and I’d been obsessional in reading blogs and dozens of dry academic books until I’d cracked the code and figured out how the economy works. As with Game, I accepted I was a clueless beginner and was willing to humble myself and start from the bottom floor.

The Lay Guide explained to me there are three types of game:

• Bar Game: Talking to girls in pubs and bars. This is mostly a verbal game in which you impress her with your witty repartee and use knowledge of group dynamics to manipulate yourself into a strong position and collect phone numbers.
• Club Game: This is mostly about getting physical with girls on or near the dance floor and then sexually escalating them until they are horny and ready to leave with you. Fuck! Hadn’t done that since I was eighteen, and I’d only pulled it off a couple of times back then.
• Day Game: Meeting girls during the daytime in coffee shops and on the street, striking up conversation, and then taking a number.

The absolute low point, a month after the separation

I’d eventually experiment with all three types but, as you’ll see, I quickly gravitated to day game. Once I’d finished with Tony Clink (and writing my own flashcards of his salient points) I moved on to the next books, the most famous of which is The Mystery Method. I still swear by this tremendously misunderstood tome. Unlike most newcomers, I didn’t go through a long “theory phase” of consuming dozens of books and instructional videos before actually going out and talking to girls. Right from the beginning I knew that was just avoidance—a way to delay the anxiety felt by approaching a girl you don’t know. Instead, I just read The Lay Guide, The Mystery Method and The Game. Within a fortnight I was itching to hit the streets.

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