At a talk I gave yesterday for the LSS I briefly went into that I consider the basic phases of a man’s journey through game. Namely:

Beginner’s Hell —-> Adventure —-> Maturity

So in the beginning everything is new and exciting but you have all kinds of problems. The psychology of unplugging from the matrix is complex and difficult because you have such a strong ego investment in your AFC ways. Most guys get enough ego payoff from their existing (mostly unsuccessful) attitudes that they can reframe themselves away from making any changes. Rollo Tomassi is probably the best writer on this topic. It’s not until a guy hits rock bottom and his ego is completely crushed by life events (such as my divorce) that he faces up to the reality that the current way isn’t getting him the life he wants.

Insanity: doing the same thing over and over while expecting a different result

So during the beginner’s hell phase you can have a swirling cocktail of thoughts and emotions. Your ego is trying to trap you into giving up and falling back into comfortable AFC patterns, your social circle is trying to put you back into your cage, you get constant bad feedback from girls because by approaching you have removed your buffers against rejection and suddenly discover you’re far less talented that you’d tricked yourself to believe, you have existential doubt from being unable to distinguish between good and bad advice….. fuck me the pain period is tough.

If you make it through (most don’t) things begin to click and you start having adventures. This is a really fun stage. You start pulling off stunts you’d have never thought possible, like same day lays or banging your first stripper. For the first time your identity changes and your subconscious begins to accept you can be the guy who is good with women. The biggest risk in this stage is turning to the Dark Side. Like a fatty discovering his first pie, the frequent-but-irregular payout of external validation and hedonistic pleasure becomes addictive. It’s easy to let your life slide and become Mr SNL or Mr Daygame. If you have an addictive or compulsive personality, you’ll suddenly find your whole life dedicated to the hunt for pussy.

Hopefully, you’ll eventually progress to the stage of Maturity. Banging women is put back into perspective with everthing else in life. You start to realise that this newfound power you have can be used for both good and bad, that it can mess up your life as well as the mess up the girls. I can’t write too much about this stage because I’m still bumbling through it myself. I have my ideas, but that’s all they are.

A blog I’ve recently started reading gives lots of advice for guys looking to transition from Adventure to Maturity. I’ve just read his post on attachment theory which, though it’s basically a restatement of the A-level textbook, offers some good insight to self diagnose what risks you specific to your situation. I liked this quote:

“For instance, a man may be more or less secure, get married to an anxious type, bring her up to a more secure level, but when they run into money trouble she falls back to her anxious level, cheats on him and then divorces him for all of his money, sending him into a tailspin of avoidance. He goes on to ignore intimacy and pump-and-dump women for the next 10 years, afraid to become intimate with any of them.”

That would be me if I stayed in the Adventure stage (in spirit, not specific details, my wife wasn’t a cheater or divorce-thief). He also links to an online test of your attachment type. Take the test. The goal is to transform yourself into a low-anxiety / secure man. If you score as “dismissive avoidant” you’ll ruin a generation of women while feeling empty and unhappy. If you score “fearful avoidant” you’ll likely regress into solitude and not approaching. The “preoccupied” quadrant suggests you are likely to get repeated oneitis and no matter how successful you become at getting girls, they’ll always ruin you.

Here’s how I scored. Three years ago I’d have been strongly dismissive-avoidant.

* Another good blog is Roosh. He doesn’t conceptualise his journey into these stages but over the past 2 years you can see, in the subtext, his gradual transition from Adventure to Maturity

There’s alot of guys out there who are hitting the streets on a regular basis, opening sets, running the model and…… not getting laid. Oh dear.

Daygame is not a hobby. If you’re approaching it with the same attitude you’d take to aircraft modelling, video games, stamp collecting or whatever then you are hamstringing yourself. I understand why people do it this way. It’s new, it’s exciting and you have approach anxiety so you have to make a game of it to reduce the ego strain. I get that. Fine. But at some point you have to move past it.

One of the biggest problems you have to work past in daygame is coming across as lightweight, as a pushover man. In bar game you can prop yourself up at a bar and laugh with all your friends, taking as much time as you wish to build vibe and draw IOIs. In street game you have to approach the girl out of nothing. It’s so easy to make the following mistakes:

• Throw loads of fake positive energy at her, responding “awesome!” to every utterance to fall out of her mouth
• Keep complimenting her past the original opening statement
• Telegraph a lack of confidence in having killed her momentum through filling all the silences and imploring her with your eyes.

I often see guys running up and down Oxford Street like buzzing beta bees. A strong gust of wind would knock them off their feet. They are too excitable, too boyish, too lightweight. If you are one of these guys…. sort it out.

Lightweight

A common misconception in Game is that you’re not getting laid because you have a “sticking point” somewhere in your model. Your model is an end-to-end tactical plan in which you shuttle the girl from stage to stage. It’s all tactics and techniques. So if you are struggling to reach hook point you work on that. If you are getting flakey numbers you need an anti-flake technique. Your success is determined by what you do in set and thus if you just keep approaching, you’ll fix it.

No. No. No.

You aren’t getting laid because you aren’t man enough for the quality of girls you are approaching.

There will be sets where you are merely fucking up your in-set process and thus you can iron out the flaws but these are a tiny minority. Mostly your sets fail because either (i) the girl isn’t available (a high proportion of them) or (ii) she’s not into you. When a girl is available and into you the set will be extremely easy. She’ll cooperate with you to remove all the obstacles between your cock and her fanny. That’s why guys who are good with women seem so smooth and effortless.

High value women do not sleep with low value men.

It’s easy to forget this. Most of the guys you see bragging on internet forums about getting laid are not providing photos. If they did you’d be rather unimpressed. Many of the guys producing flashy moves in the street or in the bar do not actually bang the girls. Even the big names – they aren’t getting laid as much or as with as high quality as they’d like you to believe. Certainly the ones I’ve met aren’t.

Believing the hype encourages you to believe a central misdirection in Game that what you do in set is important.

Yes, competent execution of the model is important but it is nowhere near as important as being a high value man. My personal metaphor is of a sports car. Imagine you want to win Le Mans 24 Hour. So you take your car onto the racetrack several times a week and hone your driving skills. You spend your evenings on race simulators and make some trips to the Le Mans circuit to drive the real track and research the brake distances and racing lines. After a while you’ll be a great driver and know exactly how to drive the track in an optimal manner.

Then you show up one June weekend for the race. With your Ford Focus. And wonder what sticking point stopped you winning the race.

but amazing in-set....

There’s alot of pussy hounds on the streets relentlessly approaching girls. Some of them, especially the ones who “get it” and don’t act like overexcitable hobbyists, develop finely-honed skills and expert calibration. They get laid. But they don’t get laid as much as they could because they are still lightweight one-dimensional men. So every lay is a grind, a limp payoff for hours and hours of drudgework. Usually with the bottom end of the quality pool that they approached.

If you want to up your success, take a break from approaching. Figure out how to be more of a man.

Here’s a short video showing the kind of work we’ve been doing in coffee shops lately. Unfortunately we didn’t actually video the best sets and this one is merely so-so. For example we were too lazy to do the preapproach value properly (Only one half-arsed sentence for the DHV when it should be an animated conversation).

Still, total dogshit or not, it shows the first half of what we were doing.

Jambone and I have been travelling around central Europe spying out places to live. The original plan was to spend three weeks in Zagreb doing bar and street game but we quickly knocked that on the head when it got cold and rainy from day one. Also, the nightlife in Zagreb is painfully bad – in bars the music is so loud you can’t talk, and in the nightclubs….. good grief, it’s like they are constructing a motorway on the dancefloor. So we hired a car and drove around Zadar, Dubrovnik, Sarajevo, Belgrade and now back to Zagreb. Happy times.

While in Sarajevo we figured out a good method to bring daygame to coffee shops. We have no interest in boring low-investment indirect game. We aren’t interested in throwing out twenty lame openers hoping to draw a couple of bites. So in times of Gaming need there’s always an answer….. turn to Mystery Method.

A gentleman's place to meet women

Here’s the Krauser/Jambone Coffee Shop Method. It’s just the MM structure adapted for our personalities and the fact we want to establish ourselves in new towns without burning them running around like dickheads street-stopping girls (works great in London, not so much in a small city). It works best if there’s two or three of you. Solo game would need some changes.

Stage One – Target selection

Roll around the cafe district looking for groups of girls sitting with coffee. Best groups will have a table free next to them and also another group (even if it’s guys) adjacent. Busy places are best. You just need the free table next to your set.

Stage Two – Preapproach value

Sit down and completely ignore the girls. Don’t even glance at them. Have a lively conversation between yourselves and hold good body language. Don’t value scan. Start to drop DHVs. Because of our trip it was easy, just things like “Tomorrow, London! Here we go. Can’t wait to get back for Lee’s fight” and “It’s much warmer here than Belgrade” etc. Let your peripehral vision catch the girls’ behaviour. You are looking for signs of recognition that they are listening to your conversation.

Stage Three – Observational Opener

This is like normal opening but you remain mostly indirect for now. The key is to avoid being the boring guy asking a female opinion or specifications on their laptop. The opener should be interesting enough to immediately capture their attention by putting some electricity into them. Depending on your vibe you can go in teasing or with a DHV.

We always started with a pre-frame as follows:

“Excuse me, ladies. I’m sorry for interrupting. Do you speak English? I’m sorry I don’t speak Croation/Bosnian/Serbian… My friend and I are just visiting from London and we couldn’t help but notice that….”

Openers we added on that hooked well:

• “… you girls are dressed very much like the girls in Belgrade”
• “… your friend here has matched her jacket to the seat. We wondered if perhaps she is so fashion conscious she chose to sit here”
• “… your coffee cups are much cooler than ours. We got plain white but you have nice patterns on. Is this some kind of anti-English thing?”
• “… you are dressed very classically french, whereas you are like a walking rainbow. Your scarf looks like someone dropped a packet of skittles on it and sat down”
• “… you are in a very animated conversation. It looks like you are plotting revenge against your ex-boyfriends.”

After the girls give back for a while, give them some typical attraction material and then roll off. The roll-off is very important. The frame depends on it.

Stage Four – Open a Pawn Set

Guys are the best for this because they’ve usually seen you open the girls and their estimation of your value shoots right up. Ask them about the best football team in town, or favourably compare one to a movie star lookalike. Whatever, just make it complimentary and not a tease. The guys will usually hook. This creates the most important moment in the set – the TV moment. The girls will usually look with shock and awe at you, like they are watching television. You’ve done a takeaway (“We aren’t guaranteed attention from these guys, we have to work for it”), a disqualifier (“They aren’t hitting on us, they are friendly to everyone”), a DHV (“They are socially savvy”) and now you can start dropping DHVs to the pawn set that will hit the target set.

We talk about travelling, our lifestyles, our friends etc. Usually the girls will open their body language right up and start IOIing hard to get your attention back.

Usually found in a seated position

Stage Five – Ignore Everyone

Go back to chatting to each other for five or ten minutes. You are showing everyone that you are happy with your own company and need nothing. Keep an eye out for any signs like the targets are leaving (e.g. settling the bill). 90% of the time you’ll find both the target set and pawn set trying to find ways back into conversation with you. For example, the men might start talking English to each other or mentioning English football teams. Wait for the right moment.

Stage Six – Reopen the target set.

The player goes to the bathroom this leaving the wing by himself. Naturally he will want to get back into conversation so you have legitimised why he’d reopen the set without hitting on the girl. You don’t need to tease much now because you’re in A3 (male-to-female interest). Start asking genuine questions about what the girls do, what they like etc. Continue to drop DHVs. Work it like a normal set. Do this as long as you feel good interest coming back and no resistance building. Keep rolling off and reopening the pawn set if necessary.

Stage Seven – Close

Usually a roll-off, reopen, then Facebook close is best.

This method is not about getting a solo girl into a dating frame. We were looking to get ourselves “in”s to the local social scene and be “the cool London guys” that they will brag to their friends about. So if we liked the pawn sets we’d close them too. The plan is to keep these sets ticking over on Facebook until we are back in their country or (if the IOIs are super strong, which sometimes happens) to work Long Game to import the girls to London for a week of dating.

There’s no rocket science here. It’s just an easy structure to meet lots of girls without looking like either “creepy street open guy” or “boring indirect guy”. There’s no risk of burning the town because even the uninterested sets walk away thinking you’re just cool social guys. We closed about 80% of opened sets with this and some of quite astonishing quality. I’ll probably put up some videos soon.

Ok you tight cunts, how about I give you a basic primer on daygame opening so you don’t have to spend a single penny on a book? I’m sitting out in a Zagreb cafe while I wait for Jambone to collect the keys for a hire car to drive us through the countryside. This is what I’ve been opening the Croat birds with. Nearly all my openers have been as follows:

“Hi. You speak good English? Great, I just wanna tell you something really quick. I was just walking past you with my friend… that’s my friend there [wave at Jambone]… when I saw you and I thought.. you look quite nice. So I wanted to say hello.”

At this point I wait for a response, and usually follow up with an assumption stack of something like

“You fit my image of a typical Croatian girl. It’s the thick eyebrows, big long hair, and crazy eyes.”

Let’s stop right there and analyse what I’m doing. It hooked every set I opened so it’s worth considering why. First thing is I’m getting right in front of the girl and commanding her to stop with quietly authortitative body language and strong eye contact. Dominance is the main arousal trigger in women. So immediately she’s getting an emotional kick out of the interaction. You can see in their eyes and smile that they are immediately enjoying it.

Next I’m qualifying them on their English and rooting the opener. Then I show a relaxed safe gesture to my friend so she gets to have a look around her and not be too startled. But perhaps the most counter-intuitive part is the compliment… you look quite nice.

Not gorgeous, not damn sexy, not stunning. Simply quite nice.

Some quite nice Croatian girls I'm met, yesterday

Why is that the best opener? Because it straddles the two extremes of (i) relating to the girl as a man talks to a woman so she’s got no doubt about the subtext to the street stop. I’m not hiding my intent or betraying a lack of confidence but (2) I’m not heaping validation on her by gushing effusively on her beauty. She hasn’t earned that yet. She’s still got work to do. This makes sense to her and doesn’t put too much pressure on her.

That might get you into a conversation right there but if she’s still a bit clammed up do the patented Krauser assumption stack which is simply “you look very [conclusion x], because of [observation x, y, z]”. This is really simple. You just look at three things you see right in front of you and feed them back to her. Make one of them a playful tease. So…..

• You look very Spanish. It’s the big hair, brown eyes, and very strange fashion sense.
• You look very serious. Because of the frown, the busy walk, and the way you are gripping your book so tightly.
• You look very playful. It’s that smile, little twinkling eyes, and that spring in your step.

If she hasn’t started giving back and moving into vibing it’s time to unload your heavy artillery….. and compare her to some form of wildlife.

• “You look like…. dare I say it…. a cute little Croatian hamster”
• “In fact, if I was to say the first thing that comes into my mind…. I would have to say… you remind me of a naughty squirrel”
• (two sets) “My friend and I thought you looked like a girafe [to the taller one] and a tiger [shorter girl]. Which is strange, because in the wild giraffes and tigers are not friends”

That’ll get you into vibing. Enjoy.

P.S. Obviously you should buy my daygame book so you know what to do next.

I’m walking through the airport lounge waiting for JJ to buy some proper luggage when I happen past the cosmetics section of duty free. There’s the usual grotty painted-up harlots hawking their wares stood infront of posters of model’s faces that are more like oil paintings than photos.

It strikes me how disconnected from the reality of actual beauty is the beauty industry. There’s no escaping the fact that men decide what is beautiful in women (and vice versa). Slogans feeding unearned entitlement (“you deserve it”) or fantasy anti-ageing (“advanced night repair formula”) are emblazoned upon essentially generic creams, gels and facepaints.

A mannish-chinned oil painting

I think of how many models I’ve dated who look sensational in portfolio pictures, easily hotter than these Estee Lauder models, but are thoroughly unremarkable in the flesh. There’s the fashion model I threesomed, the catwalk model who fell in love with me, and recently the Victoria Secrets model I instant-dated (but didn’t bang). Every one of them a stunner on paper and merely “pretty hot” in person. Make-up works.

In Thailand I was struck by how well scrawny little girls doll up. I don’t mean to belittle the little chipmunks because they are doing what comes naturally and I am a firm supporter of their being more well-presented women in the world. Here’s a case in point.

With and without makeup

This young girl is a fresh graduate I dated a couple of times last month. A sweet pleasant good girl (I can just hear all the loser farang trying to find a way to pass her off as a freelancer looking to feed her family back in the village. They need to believe good girls don’t exist in Thailand to justify them not finding any). When dolled up she’s encroaching upon eight territory. But just look at the change when she’s gone au-naturel and an unflattering photo.

The reality is she’s somewhere in the mid-seven range. Good skin, slim, limber, with charming features and a lovely manner. This was our second date. Give me that over a hoity-toity model any day of the week.