I have been on something of a reading binge, having read 136 books in 2018 (and reviewing each and every one of them) and then another 54 books so far in 2019 [1]. I’m averaging better than three books a week and I’ve hoovered up a lot of content. Perhaps it’s a good time to reflect. Here are some observations in no particular order.

1. Abundance allows risk taking

A man who reads only a handful of books a year will be extremely discriminating in what he tries. This will bias him towards authors or topics he’s already familiar with and, depending upon his goals, he may choose 100% entertainment or 100% education. When I was burning through three books a week I felt like the downside of picking a bad book was minimal. No matter how boring it got, so long as I stayed the course for two days I’d be on to the next book. This is not unlike the abundance mentality a player has with girls: if this girl isn’t working out, you can walk away and find another. This freedom to experiment enabled me to try discover different authors and topics, many of which I grew to like.

2. Ideas need time to sink in

On a couple of occasions I read three books in one day [2]. I encountered a bizarre time distortion effect whereupon I’d sink into the world of a book and its characters, only to shut the book and then promptly disappear into the next world. At the end of the day, those first two books felt like weeks in my past. A negative side-effect of fast reading is my brain didn’t have sufficient time to let ideas percolate, test them against my existing world view, and tease out all their implications. Much of that learning comes while lying in the bath, or sitting on a bus, or out walking. Often, I’d be deep into the next book by then, so the prior books wasn’t fully explored before having been pushed out of my awareness by the next.

3. Reading can be insatiable

I soon realised the addictive qualities of mass reading. My attention span lengthened enormously so I’d think nothing of sitting in a chair for six hours straight. Books were answering questions, exploring topics, and introducing imaginary worlds. I’d find myself immersed and not wishing to do anything else. Often lines or phrases would trigger compelling questions that I’d mull over for minutes at a time. It was all so interesting that as soon as I finished one book I’d have a chocolate box selection of interesting titles to try next. I was almost resentful that by choosing one book, I’d have to decline the others, and thus I wanted to race to the end of the current book to minimise the missed opportunities. That made it quite compulsive behaviour for me.

4. Movies and TV are shit

“The book is better than the movie” is true in 99% of cases. The human brain can process words and ideas far faster than physical action and the human voice can articulate them. Thus an hour of reading time packs in far more than an hour of televisual time. Added to that, books are generally far longer than movies and TV shows – the only exception being a premium cable series. These latter shows have the time to develop complex plots and introduce mood-setting redundancy. In a movie, there’s the famous dictum that if you show a gun on the mantelpiece in the first act, it must be fired by the third act. Nothing can be introduced without being relevant. After a while this gets tiresome and predictable. Books can hide foreshadowing better and even create wild goose chases to misdirect you.

Aaron Sorkin made the observation that stories belong in different media. If the focus is physical action, it’s a movie. If the focus is dialogue, it’s a play. If it’s internal thoughts and emotion, it’s a book. This makes books more immersive by nature, as they are a medium for pulling you into the character’s minds rather than observing them from the outside. Lastly, movies and TV are shit because they are pozzed and designed by committee. Books can touch subjects in ways that ((executives)) don’t allow in movies and TV.

5. Writers are good at different parts of writing

As a writer, I’m constantly attempting to improve my own literary ability. One dividing line I often see between writers is between writers of good stories, and writers of good prose. For example, War & Peace has beautiful sentence construction. Judged on a sentence-by-sentence basis its really very impressive. But it’s boring as fuck. It’s just not a good story [3]. In contrast, pulp magazine adventure writers in the early 1920s were often the opposite in that the stories whipped along in compelling and imaginative fashion but the sentences were as painfully crude as music played out of key.

Some writers are fantastic at snappy dialogue, some set a scene well, some tease out human emotion from the strangest places, some set you thinking about how to live the Good Life. Some are competent at everything and special at nothing. Reading lots of books allowed me to see the differences in stark contrast.

6. I like dusting off old gems

I’ve got an aversion to reading modern books and popular books. Generally, I don’t like the pozz, the dumbed-down style, and the pretension. I’d rather read the books by the men who created civilisation than the Jews men who try to destroy it. The wonder of books is they transport you into the writer’s world, and thus reading, for example, Edgar Wallace’s Sanders Of The River stories gives you window into colonial Africa from the viewpoint of a Victorian Englishman. You simply can’t get that on TV or movies. Recently I experimented with picking up dusty paperbacks from a second-hand store, selecting for authors and genres I rarely favour. I also try old stuff on Kindle. Lots of it is fascinating. It feels like you’re the only person to read the book in over fifty years.

7. Committing to finish what I start

I’ve had a rule that if I start a book, I must finish it. I’ve only broken that rule one time, on Ernest Becker’s Denial Of Death [4]. A dozen times I’d start a book and be shaking my head thinking “oh fuck, I’ve picked a bad one” but in each case by the end I was glad I read it. Most recently, I finished Martin Butler’s The Corporeal Fantasy. It’s mostly his blog posts and podcast transcripts hastily edited into book format (it really shows), conveying his personal philosophical system based on Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Kant. For the first thirty pages I thought he was just a rambling old fruitcake [5] but I persevered and by the end I was extremely glad I’d read it because a sentence here, a turn of phrase there, and even entire paragraphs set me off thinking about philosophical issues in directions I’d never before considered. Had I been more judgemental, I’d have deleted it from my Kindle early and missed out. Committing to finish what I start ensures I encounter scenarios, ideas, and styles I might otherwise filter out.

8. Projects get ambitious

Most people who’ve heard of Alexandre Dumas and want to try him will read The Count Of Monte Cristo. If you’re such a man, I heartily recommend it. Those who get a little more ambitious might read his trilogy of which The Three Musketeers is volume one. More ambitious still, you’ll read all FIVE books of that series. I was more ambitious still – I decided to read all of his multi-volume series, namely: The D’Artagnan Romances, The Valois Saga, The Saint-Hermaine Trilogy, The Marie Antoinette Saga. That’s a total of 17 books, most just as long as The Three Musketeers, itself a big book (so far I’ve read 12).

I read his Joseph Balsamo volume 1 halfway through before realising I had a bad translation, so I bought the better translation and read that same half again – on the same day.

When you read a lot, a 200-page paperback seems like nothing. Just a warm-up. I’ve found myself drawn ever stronger towards epic books and multi-part series. I want the greater journey, and greater complexity that demands ample word-count to achieve.

9. You learn things you didn’t expect to

Napoleon Bonaparte conquered Egypt and then, when the British Navy sank his fleet near Alexandria, he deserted his troops and snuck back into France incognito in order to carry out a coup d’etat. I have now read about those events from three different perspectives: Dumas gave the French nationalist version in his The Companions of Jehu. Dennis Wheatley gave the British espionage perspective in his The Sultan’s Daughter. Then I also read the Time Life History Of The World academic summary version. I’ve also ordered a bodice-ripping women’s romance novel covering the events to see how they approach the material.

I never expected I’d learn so much about the conditions of St Petersburg during the Bolshevik Revolution, but I’ve now read two memoirs on it: one from a British spy, and one from an anarchist Jew. My knowledge of the courts of the kings of France is epic, thanks to Dumas and Wheatley, and I know lots of the Bottom World side of that period thanks to Casanova. It’s enlightening.

I may add more thoughts in another post, should they occur to me.

If you still just want to chase skirt and increase your notch count, remember all my best books are on Amazon now, in full colour, and Daygame Overkill is still the best infield instructional video product.

[1] Readers who have read some mathematics books will know 136+54=190 rather than 200. Those who have read some rhetoric books know that a catchy but inaccurate title sells more copies than a clunky but accurate one.
[2] It was raining.
[3] It’s hugely deficient in intention-plus-obstacle. It meanders without purpose.
[4] It’s horrendously insipid NYC Jewish psychoanalytical claptrap. Imagine watching Woody Allen movies on loop into perpetuity.
[5] Maybe he is, you be the judge. He certainly misunderstands Trump and Brexit.

“Nick is a right fat bastard” are words that had never been uttered until 2016. Then, at the tail end of the year, I stepped onto the scales to see I weighed a whopping 13 1/2 stone (86kg/189lbs). Those of you familiar with the old boxing weight divisions will remember the cruiser-weight limit is 190lbs.

Famous cruiser-weight world champions include Evander Holyfield and David Haye, men who went on to win the heavyweight title. Another heavyweight champ, Michael Moorer, won his first world title at light heavyweight. So, 189lbs was clearly not a good weight for me. I took a bit more care, laid off the TGI Friday’s milkshakes, and slimmed down to 83kg, 183lbs.

The real weight loss began in July 2018, at 83kg, and ended in February 2019, at 70kg. So now I was in my natural boxing weight division and I’d only need to fight guys like Gennady Golovkin and Carl Frotch. My waist shrank from 36 inches to 29 – the slimmest of my entire adult life. I’m far from a diet expert but I think trimming 13kg at the age of 43 was quite an achievement and some of you might want to know how I did it.

Phase 1 – The Mad Crash Diet

I installed the Chronometer app on my phone in which I input my daily food intake. The app’s database holds the relevant nutritional data so it can track my daily calories and macro-nutrients. For two months my only target was to maximise my daily calorie deficit. My body required approximately 2000 calories for maintenance and most days I ate around 1000, giving me a whopping 1000 calorie deficit. Typically, I ate only once a day at 3pm after the gym, so I was intermittent fasting 23 hours.

In addition to this I went to the gym three times a week (half-assing it) and walked an average of 7 miles a day, equivalent to adding another 400 calories to the deficit. The result was I ended August at 76kg, a total cut of 7kg.

All was not as good as it appears. First, it wasn’t 7kg of fat. Contained in that weight was loss of glycogen muscle stores and lots of water. I also was laid up in bed three times with ‘flu, something I rarely catch under normal conditions. I was also listless and irritable. I spent every evening fantasising about food and it took tremendous willpower to keep to the diet.

Still, I lost a ton of weight so I was happy.

 

Phase 2 – Maintenance

It was then that my bodybuilder friend convinced me my madcap diet was foolhardy. For all of September I’d been unable to lose any more weight. I was still on regular -700 to -1000 deficits but despite ravenous hunger I couldn’t shift weight. My body had adjusted my metabolism to cope with the starvation. So, I spent one full month back on 1900 calories daily maintenance.

My weight went up to 78kg which bothered me but it was just the water and glycogen refilling. I felt much better. It was also on the third month that I began weightlifting properly. My weekly routine was split into 4 sessions. Each began with a large compound (dead-lift, bench press, barbell squat, overhead dumbbell press respectively) and then three smaller exercises. The two key principles were:

1. Reverse Pyramid Training: lift the first set at maximum load. Take 10% off the bar for the second set and try to match same reps, plus one extra. If there’s a third set, keep it same as second.
2. Progressive Overload: single-minded focus on adding weight to the bar every session, and if unable to do that, try to force out at least one more rep. Keeping pushing weight upwards.

Psychologically, my trainer encouraged me to put 100% mental focus into the first set of the first compound exercise. Max that, then just try my best for the rest of the session without undue worry. I trained six times a week. It would’ve been seven, but the gym was closed on Sunday.

Phase 3 – Sensible deficit

With my metabolism reset, I returned to daily calorie deficits, but only -300 to -500. I remained ravenously hungry at night but was no longer a slobbering beast. I still had newbie gains in the gym so was making good progress with the overloading, despite the deficit that should’ve been weakening me. This was my CNS adaptation – my central nervous system was becoming more efficient at controlling my muscles, so my strength gains were due to that more than they were to hypertrophy and repair. It’s why I could keep training six times a week.

At the end of December I’d gotten to 73kg but it was a much better body composition than my August 76kg. I wasn’t so drained. I was 50% stronger on all my lifts compared to August.

Phase 4 – Sensible recovery

My lifts plateaued in December on all the compounds, my gains limited to the secondary exercises. This suggested my newbie CNS-adaptation gains were over. Now I needed hypertrophy, which meant I needed longer recovery. So, I cut the training from six to four days and also eliminated one secondary exercise per session. I also increased rest time between sets, using a stopwatch to be precise.

From mid-December to mid-February I finally hit my goal of 70kg. The compounds were stubbornly unchanged but I was pleased to at least retain my strength under deficit conditions. It took rather a lot of willpower in the gym. While lifting, I sounded like a women’s tennis match.

I’m now doing lean gains with a calorie surplus and am up to 74kg but I’ll report back on that later. It’s a completely different process and I’ve been doing it less than two months. Early results are encouraging. So, that’s the detail. How about if I learned anything from the process? Okay, here are some thoughts…..

1. To lose weight, only calorie control really matters. You must run a daily deficit. It takes willpower because you’ll be hungry most of your waking hours.
2. Intermittent fasting helps, especially a 16-hour fast – that basically means skipping supper and breakfast. It’s very easy to do.
3. Sugar is the big killer. Cut it out of everything. Get used to bland food.
4. I’d never taken diet or weights seriously before. You absolutely must make it your first priority in life to make big fast improvement. If I’d had a job, or been daygaming, I’d have too little willpower remaining to expend in the gym and resisting bad food.
5. Almost everyone in the gym is half-assing it or training badly. I made more progress in six months than the previous five years combined. So many people do stupid routines, girly gay weights, and bad form.
6. It’s incredibly satisfying to see your body look a little better every single week.
7. Body dysmorphic disorder is real. I would take a photo in the mirror and think I looked good, then two months later look back on it and realise I was still fat then and wonder how I’d been unable to see it.
8. Everything in life became easier. Imagine how heavy a 15kg rucksack feels on your back. I’d been walking around with one of them every minute of every day. Now I’m free of it.
9. It’s astonishing what can be achieved at 44 years old 100% naturally. I look better now than I did in my mid-twenties when I was extremely fit from kickboxing (but had a shit diet). I’ve far exceeded my original target from beginning the cut.

Here is the full talk I gave at the recent London event with Street Attraction.

In other news, I agreed my first residential coaching of the 2019. I’ll be doing a couple more so if you’re interested check out here.

You all know my shtick: Euro-jaunt season begins in late-March and runs to early-November. Then there’s an off-season hibernation in which I recuperate and catch up on my projects. It was different this time around because in summer I quit daygame. That revulsion period lasted awfully long, the longest and deepest I’ve ever experienced.

I’m done being a notch-hunting player, but not done with girls. Hence, at some point, I’d need to get back in the saddle and make a go of it. Wanting to at least leave the option of daygame open, should my revulsion lift, spending my winter in Newcastle was ruled out.

So where?

Well, the third world is fucking disgusting. I’ve already tried Mexico, Brazil, and Thailand. Shit-holes. Never again. The Balkans and Russian Federation are too damn cold. I settled on Prague. If nothing else, it’s a lively and beautiful city. I flew out on the 4th January and returned to the UK not quite two months later. I set myself some goals, in descending order of importance:

1. Gym and Diet
2. Writing
3. Reading
4. Daygame

Now the two-month period is up, I’ll tally my score against objectives. Not really sure why anyone would care, but this blog is about my life’s path, so suck it up.

Gym and Diet
I’d become a right fat bastard. Since first moving to Japan in 2000 I’d been fairly fit and trim, right up until 2014. My mental self-image was as a fit, healthy young man. By 2015 the reality was starting to slip further away from it. The fattest I ever got was 86kg and a 36 inch waist in January 2017. I lost a bit that year but remained chubby. In the summer of 2018 I weighed 83kg and dared not measure my waist – probably 35 inches.

Still, when I looked at myself in the mirror I didn’t seem fat – not to my naked eye. Especially when I sucked my belly in. My self-delusion was broken in June 2018 in Warsaw. My Ukrainian regular came around for sex and she’s quite happy to have me record her on camera. So, I videoed my fucking her. When I watched back the tape, I was horrified. I looked fucking disgusting naked. Bitch tits, distended stomach, puff face, thick smooth thighs. I felt sorry for the poor girl. Love is blind.

My next stop was Belgrade where, as luck would have it, I was sharing an apartment with Jimmy for a week. He’d just begun an extreme calorie restriction diet. I joined him. We spent all week eating barely 1000 calories a day, competing to see who was hungriest. It was awful, but the weight dropped off. I continued the starvation diet until the end of August, when a bodybuilder friend explained I need to do it smarter. I agreed – I’d weakened by immune system so much I was bedridden with ‘flu three times in two months.

Still, better than being fat.

I’ve been training hard and watching my diet ever since. My highest priority in Prague was to maintain this discipline. It was a success. I didn’t miss a single gym session, nor miss a single day’s diet target. 100% success on my top priority – easy really, it’s all within my control. I ended my weight cut in early February at 71kg with a 29 inch waist, 39 inch chest. Since then I’m targeting lean gains and a daily +300 calorie surplus. I’ve only gained 0.5kg so far as the glycogen, water, and food weight stablise.

Writing
The big goal was to write another memoir, finishing the first draft before leaving Prague. Initially I expected to do a single volume to cover 2015 and 2016. That soon became impractical, as I’d need to rush too many stories and leave too much out. So, I split the period to give each year its own volume. My Prague goal was to finish volume 5, for 2015.

I’ve done that. It’s a 40 chapter, 155k word draft now. I’m happy with it. It can now be added to the queue of memoir volumes to be edited. It feels like a weight off my shoulders, not just because writing a big book in two months is quite a task. It also puts me 6/7ths towards completing my memoir project. Additionally, I was concerned I might not remember enough details to tell the stories well. I needn’t have feared. Additionally, my Instagram account and Airbnb booking history helped me get the timeline exactly right, with all the stories in order.

Reading
This was a high priority last year and writing a review after each book was rather demanding. I relieved myself of that for 2019. There were no targets for reading, just a general sense that I want to maintain my reading momentum. I’ve come to very much enjoy it, so much so that my Netflix and video game time has shrunk to almost nothing.

I read 35 books in two months. Many were normal novels, but there were also three massive Alexandre Dumas epics, and a massive Great American Novel. I can also tick off ‘reading’ as a success.

Daygame
And here we get to the goal that was least important and also least within my control. My intent remained low, but I was pleased to find on some days I was enjoying it again. The extended break had rekindled some of my interest. I did very few solo sets but had a regular wing from England, and also Roy Walker was over for a weekend when I gave it a good effort.

Overall, I did around 60 sets. Maybe a bit more, I wasn’t logging them. I got an SDL with a hot Russian tourist I met in Palladium. She made it rather easy for me, and my game felt out of practice so I was lucky that it didn’t matter. I dated a few more girls of the type I really like, including a very memorable Kazahk village girl. Ultimately, only the Russian panned out.

About 3/4 of the time, my game felt way off the peak. For the 1/4 it went well, it was almost like the good old days. Those latter sets were great fun and I remembered why I like daygame. Overall, I’ll say this was a qualified success. The worst of the revulsion is over, I still appear to have some of the old magic left, and I can only see myself getting better as the weather improves and I shake off more of the cobwebs.

I’m curious. I think BlackDragon is a faker and full of shit. His “rebuttal” to my accusation that he’s a pathetic delusional cuck was nothing of the sort. It was a squirt of squid ink: obfuscation masquerading as rebuttal.

When you’re over the target, that’s when you get the flak.

It’s one thing to read a man’s material, watch his videos, and conclude he’s full of shit. It’s quite another to watch him dissemble and run away in real time. BlackDragon made oh-so-big-a-deal about him being all about the business and that my post lead to a rapid +19% rise in his eBook sales [1]. There are also people accusing me of attacking him in an attempt to lure his Loser Club over to my business. Something rang false, again. So, I’m increasingly suspicious that the BlackDragon Alpha Male 2.0 scam is more of a Potemkin village than I’d first credited. I don’t know it is, so I’m posting this to see if my readers can confirm one way or the other.

Here are the red flags:
1. His post got 63 comments so far, of which 10 are from him. So, 53 from real people. Mine has 103, all real people.
2. His side bar claims 20,000 subscribers on his email list. That’s A LOT [2]
3. His Alexa rank is high than mine, but not massively so.
4. His SimilarWeb stats are not much higher than mine in any respect. This despite my solidly neglecting my blog while he actively curates his.

My initial conclusion is that his level or traffic and engagement does not support his grandiose image of his business. I know I occupy a tiny niche and I live comfortably but nothing to puff my chest out about. If you can throw the rock of 20,000 subscribers into a pool, I’d expect more ripples.

So, what’s going on? Does BlackDragon have a big successful business and it merely isn’t fully represented in his reader engagement and traffic? Or are his business claims as delusional as the claims of his sex life? I really don’t know. I’m no expert in analysing websites from a distance. Are there any experts in this area?

It seems relevant to me. This clown has the temerity to ask readers for $9597 per year to join his VIP Losers Club. I’m curious just how many suckers he’s lured into his shell game.

[1] The proceeds of which will fund him for a few more hookers. Glad to be a help to his sex life.
[2] If it were true, lol.

I promised myself that this year I would resist the temptation to play PUA Police. The world is so full of bullshitters and charlatans that exposing them is like a game of whack-a-mole. A wannabe seducer needs to develop his own nose for fakes, a calibration skill that will serve him well when dealing with women. Think about it: if you can’t spot an incompetent fraud like JMULV, how likely are you to penetrate the layer of subterfuge that covers female interactions with men?

One thing I’ve noticed lately is how many men will take a fraud seriously just because the guy has a blog / book / YouTube channel. Their reasoning seems to be, “this guy is a legitimate expert whose advice I ought to follow, because he says on his own marketing platform that he is.” Pick-up adversely selects for men who are naive, unable to read social cues, easily hoodwinked, and who over-rate book learning. Write a blog, hawk an ebook, and get some credulous seminar booker or podcaster to talk about you…. that’s it. You can now sell memberships to a Superior Man Inner Circle.

You people really need to learn to evaluate the evidence presented. Just because a random man on the internet tells you he’s an Alpha Male doesn’t make it so. Does he have an Instagram that is all bluff, showing a lonely wandering existence with no friends, no girls, and no visible success (e.g. Christian Macqueen, Troy Francis)? Perhaps you should prioritise the evidence of your eyes over his claims to be a social circle whizz or lone wolf sigma. Does his Instagram show him with lots of obvious hookers that he claims are notches (e.g. JMULV)? Does he talk like a double glazing salesman, full of glib evasion and clumsy Cialdini-like persuasion and his life seems locked into a squalid circle of messy apartments and fruity short-term ‘friends’ (e.g. Beckster)?

It’s not hard. Trust your nose. If someone looks, talks and quacks like a fruitcake, he’s probably a fruitcake.

I love Donald J. Trump and I’d love to see him Make America Great Again. We can start with the USA’s pick-up community because it’s undoubtedly the worst in the world. Perhaps because it’s the biggest market and thus attracts the most scammers. Perhaps it’s because Americans tend to be a trusting bunch. Perhaps it’s because America uses 80% of the world’s prescription drugs and therefore roiding up till you are red in the face and shoving nootropics down your gullet doesn’t strike you as very odd behaviour indeed for a man of high self-esteem. I don’t know what the cause is, but America is positively rife with bullshitting PUAs.

The funniest of these is BlackDragon. And oh my god, is he funny.

I read BD a while ago and immediately smelled a rat. By his own admission he’s an unattractive middle-aged man living in the Portland area who gets laid mostly from online dating sites. Just stop and think about that. If that one-sentence description didn’t immediately set alarm bells ringing, you are clueless.

Portland is SJW-central. It’s an absolute hell-hole of unattractive women. It’s not Prague, or Belgrade, or Moscow. It’s one of the ugliest cities in a country full of ugly women. Now add in the fact BD is not using high-level daygame. He’s using online dating which, as every man who cold approaches will attest, always leads to a drop of a point or two (minimum) from cold approach. Take it further: BD is an older gent chasing younger women, and thus aiming very high. Lastly, he’s admitted to being physically unattractive – while searching for women in a format where age or photos are the most important criteria in passing the first filter for hook point.

BlackDragon would need exceptional charisma to surmount these odds. There’s your first red flag.

The second red flag was how he constantly positioned himself as an Alpha Male and then directs you to either self-referential blogposts (i.e. circular sourcing, which doesn’t increase credibility) or to products with buzzword titles and taglines. That carries the unmistakable whiff of the online bullshit artist attempting to dip his hands in the pocket of a newbie before he learns the lay of the land.

The third red flag were BlackDragon’s preposterous claims about MLTR (Multiple Long-Term Relationships, i.e. open) and monogamy. Not only that, but about raising children in such an environment. Even if you took him at his word (which I don’t) BD was advocating raising children in an environment where his dad is openly sleeping with women who aren’t his mother, where his father has openly rejected monogamy and love of his mother, and where mummy is sleeping around like a worthless whore too. That’s child abuse. It’s spectacularly tone-deaf and egocentric. I’ll tell you something right now: the only men who obsess over “harems”, “rotations”, and “MLTRs” are men who either don’t have them, or are flush with the excitement of recently getting that kind of action. It’s an ego-driven goal and the thrill wears off very quickly. That BD is constantly puffing his chest out about it is a huge red flag that his reality isn’t very impressive at all.

Then, of course, we get to the absence of evidence. Having, according to his marketing spiel, lived the Alpha Male Lifestyle for six years sleeping with Ultra Very Young Women it would be reasonable to suppose he’d have a ton of evidence to prove it. I mean, if you’ve persuaded UVYW to sleep with you in MLTRs and you’re an Alpha Male, then persuading them to let you post evidence about it shouldn’t be too hard. Every legitimate PUA finds a way to do so.

From 2014 onward I made very little effort to continue proving my bona fides but you can still find plenty of infields, Same Day Lay videos, and pictures of me with hot girls. You can bump into me on the streets, or interrogate active daygamers who’ve winged or travelled with me. It’s really not hard to prove your bona fides if you actually have game.

Anyway. All those preceding paragraphs explain why I very quickly dismissed BlackDragon as just another basement-dwelling bullshitter. It took about half an hour and skimming through a dozen blogposts of his. I left it at that. The reason I return to the subject is my faithful commentors have done far more research and fleshed out just how delusional and full of shit BlackDragon really is.

And oh my God is it comically funny. Let’s start with the best one.

Please read this post. I beg you to. It’s cringe on a level beyond Ricky Gervais or Mr Bean. Here’s the summary: Black Dragon married an ageing mudshark who was hitting the wall and brought along her bastard offspring of a deadbeat negro wanderer. I didn’t make that up or infer it. Those are the literal facts contained within his own blogpost. If my friends like Roy Walker or Mr White had SDL’d such a skank outside Palladium mall at midnight I’d have never let them live it down. BlackDragon wifed her up for ten years and adopted the mystery-meat son as his own.

“Fortunately, my son’s bio-dad is a loser whom he doesn’t even remember, and was living in another state when we got married, so it was game on. She was a white blonde Barbie, and her son was a fun half-black half-white hyper kid. She became my wife, he became my son.”

He literally cucked. Rollo has great posts on this kind of self-abasement. Read through them to get a feel for just how craven and weak a man must be to knowingly put himself into that position. His kid has wisely rejected the squalid ego-driven hooker-shagging of his dad. Probably because this kind of thing kept happening:

“My rule with my kids in terms of the women I see is that none of my women are allowed to have access to my kids in any way whatsoever unless the woman has proven to me that she’s going to stick around for a very long time. As you might imagine, very few women ever get that far, so the vast majority of the women I sleep with never, ever meet my kids, even in passing.

Of course life isn’t perfect, so there have been occasions where the schedule gets fucked up and my daughter might see a woman quickly leaving the house or something. I do admit that’s happened before, but not often.”

Poor kid.

But there’s more! Read this one.

Now he’s admitting that he uses hookers, while desperately trying to convince himself that it’s not whoremongering and that these women he pays for sex are not like those other women that other men pay for sex. He calls it “sugar daddy game” – yes, game. Paying women to sleep with you is game now. Like every other delusional whoremonger he spends considerable time convincing himself the women genuinely like him and he’s not just a pathetic loser.

Look, how much more evidence do you need? If it’s not enough that he married a skank six years older than him, got knowingly cucked with her son, and has to pay to have sex, what more do you need to convince you he has no game and isn’t any kind of role model to pattern your life on? He is like a posterboy for Rollo’s archetypal victim of femcentrism.

At least his women aren’t openly cucking him by letting other men bang them out. Oh wait, what’s this?

“Fortunately, since I’m an Alpha Male 2.0 and outcome independent…” he says. Oh, my sides! Wait, it gets even better. Here he is describing the yo-yo knickered slag: “She’s blonde, trim, super hot, and what most men would consider a 9 or 10 unless you don’t like blonde white women. I’m not going to show you photos at this time so please don’t ask. She’s 37 years old.”

A 37 year old 10. Yes, he actually said that.

But she’s no doubt sweet and girl and feminine…. “She’s a corporate woman with many years of professional experience. She has an impressive resume and is an extremely hard worker. This is another common trait with women I really like and tend to be attracted to.” If you’re reading this Roissy, please go easy on him! BD is ticking more boxes on Rollo’s checklist of cucked effeminate clueless beta: the inversion of male-female polarity and the valorisation of women’s resumes in the male sphere.

It’s going to hurt my head to continue. Let’s summarise. BlackDragon is an internet alpha. He’s a mouthy deluded low-value cuck who pays for sex, his girlfriend is a busted old shrike who sleeps with other men, and his head is full of all the beta brainwashing Rollo has dedicated his life to undoing. BlackDragon offers no evidence whatsoever that he has game. Obviously. He has constructed a complex front in which he’s really an Alpha Male 2.0, an enlightened modern man with an innovative lifestyle, and a source of learning for a future generation of womanizers.

In short, he’s completely delusional.

“BlackDragon” is a false idealised self for the low-value, pathetic cuck that is Caleb Jones as he tries to convince himself and others that he’s not an ageing shlub shacked up with a skank, pays hookers to pretend to like him, and role-plays “father” to another man’s son.

Really, people? At least JMULV knows he’s full of shit.

If you’ve already given BlackDragon your money then you’re too far gone for my books to be any use to you. But, here’s the link anyway.

It’s been something of an annual custom for me to do two things in winter: release a major new product, and do a London seminar. Though I was tempted to do both an infield video product and a new daygame textbook this year, ultimately…. I just couldn’t be bothered. The memoir is more important to me, so I’m doing that first.

However, I do rather enjoy these seminars. It’s nice to visit my old stomping ground in London. At last year’s Daygame Infinite talk there was a big room full of keen daygamers and I got properly steaming drunk right after. Happy times.

So, imagine my pleasure when Eddie Hitchens of Street Attraction raised the topic of doing another seminar this year. He was sitting on some infields he and Richard had shot, and also a book he’d been working on. Their fellow coach George had been on a deep dive into the sociology side of Game and the manosphere. The Street Attraction lads had things they wanted the world to see.

As did I.

I’d only recently committed myself to finishing the seven-volume memoir series. Rather than pitch a product at the seminar, I quite fancied the idea of taking a holistic look back at my Player’s Journey, at the themes that emerged as I tackled each volume of the memoir. This would be the first time presenting live where, as far as I was concerned, I was looking back on the Game rather than being intimately involved as an active player. What interesting snippets could I share to men following the same road as myself, men who started later and have yet to see things I’ve grown very familiar with?

Everything is lined up now. The venue is booked. The ticket page is up.

So, if you’d like to hear me rattled on about life as a player, go sign up. Eddie, Richard, and George will also be presenting so you won’t have to suffer my rambling for the whole six hours. More details on the ticket page here.

P.S. In other news, I decided I will coach some residentials this year. Check this page for more details, and there’s a detailed review from a former client here. I’ll post more soon, but I’m accepting enquiries now. I’ll probably limit myself to three clients for 2019.

“Nick, weren’t there four guys taking up your Winter Memoir Challenge?” asked some lad I don’t know in the comments. What fortuitous timing because I had just received the email from one of the four announcing he has pulled the trigger on publishing his first memoir.

So, with Thomas Crown having made a strong statement of intent with his memoir before Christmas, it is the turn of Oswald Kuragin to throw down the gauntlet with Millennials Among The Ruins….

You want squalor? You want Bottom World? You want to see a man mired in a world of alcohol abuse, strip-clubs, and liberal arts student go onto a long journey of Game and self-development? Well, let’s hear how Kuragin describes his memoir:

In this horrific and depressing tale, Ozz presents us with his descent into the dark depths of Edinburgh’s underbelly: the goth subculture, Pick-Up Artistry and long, freezing cold nights of excess and self-indulgence. The Twenty-First Century has never looked bleaker.

I was fortunate to receive the first draft of this last autumn and found it a good solid read. It differs from the usual daygame memoir because though Kuragin is an actual on-the-street-doing-his-sets daygamer, his book is written to cover the full panorama of squalor of which daygame is but a piece. Right from the beginning I was regaled with stories of closet homosexuals running dating skills meet-ups, of drunken strip club addicts, and of insufferably pretentious art-cafe students.

This is a proper 372-page book available now in paperback on Lulu and on Kindle at Amazon. We are lucky to have a new crop of memoirs coming through from a new bunch of writers. Let’s encourage this creative output and reward the writers for giving us another real-life document and another view on the avant-garde lifestyle we all swear allegiance to.

I’m more of a writer than a daygamer now. That’s somewhat obvious to those of you masochists who still read my blog in the vain hope I’ll start posting interesting stuff again [1]. This blog began way back in 2009 with the explicit goal of logging my Player’s Journey from stumbling amateur to (hopefully) mPUA.

Am I now an mPUA? I’d like to think so, if such a creature exists.

Now that 2019 rolls around my goal hasn’t really changed. I still want to log my Player’s Journey. Only now I’m looking back on it and I’m really into writing books. So, I’m all about the memoir. Of all my projects, it’s the memoir that is dearest to my heart. It’s the culmination of the whole blog project [2]. It’s only fair I give y’all an update on how that’s going. Take a deep breath, it’s complicated.

My rewrite of volume one (Balls Deep) is done. It’s currently 210k words, massively expanded from the original 130k, and completely rewritten. It might as well be a completely new book. It’s currently “in editing” but that’s held up because my preferred editor is way behind schedule. It was promised before Christmas but all kinds of calamity has occurred [3].

Volumes two, three, and four are all published in nice colour editions on Ingram and available on Amazon and Aero (for US customers only) – and of course here. Those are final versions and will not be rewritten or updated. They are all significantly improved from the B/W versions still on Lulu.

Now is where it gets interesting.

The full Nick Krauser [4] memoir will be SEVEN volumes. Yes, seven. I only decided for sure today. What’s all that about then? Let me explain.

Originally I was happy to close out the memoir with Adventure Sex, ending my story at December 2014. However, I continued to daygame right up until spring of 2018. That’s when I finally decided my Player’s Journey was over. I’m not done with women by any means, but the Euro-Jaunting notch-hunting technique-refining lifestyle I’d followed for many years was over. Knowing there was an end point to the story and I’d already reached it meant something important to me regarding the memoir – I had an end-point to which I could write and it was possible to tell my whole player story.

That got me motivated again. So, I decided to write two further volumes. One to cover 2015/16 (volume 5) and one to cover the rest (2017/18 – volume 6). The latter events being fresher in my mind, I took advantage of that improved recall for detail and wrote Little Brown Sex Machines. I have the completed draft sitting on my hard drive. Roy Walker has already test read it [5]

So, do I finalise Balls Deep Second Edition or Little Brown Sex Machines first?

Neither, sir. Neither!

I decided to write volume five. Just get all the drafts done and edit at my leisure. I began writing ten days ago and just half an hour ago I reached a key milestone: 50k words. One third of the projected total book size. That means volume five is no longer a coulda-shoulda-woulda nebulous concept. It’s a very real book and 1/3 of it is already done.

However, it’s now clear that it’ll take all 150k words to cover the many stories and shenanigans of 2015 alone. It’ll take another 150k for the outstanding 2016 period. So now volume five is split into two, making seven in total.

Bored yet?

Allow me to summarise all this nonsense for the few of you still reading:

#1 Balls Deep – second edition draft is completed
#2 A Deplorable Cad – published
#3 Younger Hotter Tighter – published
#4 Adventure Sex – published
#5 Untitled – first draft 1/3 written *current project*
#6 Untitled – nothing. Pie in the sky fantasy as yet
#7 Little Brown Sex Machines – first draft is completed

There will be no volume 8 because I’ve not done anything worth writing about since the period covered by LBSM ends. I intend to keep racing through #5 for the next month or so and – ambitious though the schedule is – to finish the first draft by the end of February. I will then turn my attention to preparing all three books for publication.

Only then will I begin the last leg of this project – volume 6. That’s the plan, anyway. It may all change fast. Writing is a precarious activity.

[1] Mind you, I got an SDL with a hot Russian tourist on my third approach of 2019. So, I’m not quite ready for the knacker’s yard.
[2] Well, that and getting paid.
[3] The draft is safe. It’s his edit work that he contrived to delete somehow. Added to technical and other issues, the whole thing is problematic.
[4] TM
[5] Eventually

Chapters One and Two

Chapter Three – Ye New Year, New Skirt

The story so far: Krauser asked if I was going to do another ‘Ask Jimmy’ before the end of the year. At the same time I remembered someone had asked for stories of classic Mystery Method night game. In a moment of massive overreaching (my only real weakness) I decided I was going to do a ‘three part yule story’ in which I meet a witch and she teaches me Mystery Method, with references to snow and mulled wine awkwardly shoe-horned in here and there. I regretted this commitment halfway through writing part one (as you have probably guessed by now), but never forget the important part of all this ‘Ask Jimmy’ stuff: Nick buys me a pint for every post I write. So here’s pint three, err I mean, part three (the final part, you’ll no doubt be pleased to hear), which is nothing more a thinly veiled re-writing of a dusty old field report about night game from about ten years ago, with some slight adjustments for plot and humour (the actual field report didn’t happen on a new year’s eve, for example). It’s a good field report and to anyone who has done MM style night game, it will be like a walk down memory lane.

Happy new year everyone! I hope you had a good 2018 and I hope 2019 brings you more steps forward in terms of health, wealth and skirt. Remember, we’d be bored if it were easy, but we still wish it were.

‘Wow Jimmy, it’s not a decision I could have made myself’, Tiger said solemnly, as he sipped his mulled wine. The train chattered loudly as it made its way to Clapham Junction and five knaves sat together in the centre of the carriage, excitable about the night ahead.

‘I could have handled it lads, but I’d have probably gone for the pie and pint day’, admitted G sadly as he stared at the floor. ‘That’s me being selfish, because I just love the Squid so much. Jimmy you chose the option that suited all of us’.

‘Don’t think a thing of it lads’, Jimmy said smoothly. ‘Don’t get me wrong, I love the Squid as much as the next man. It’s my only real weakness’. He wagged an authoritative finger at the gathered men and continued, ‘but I said to the crone, I said “Crone, there’s a time to be selfless and this is it, so you’d better get this sorted”.

‘We know Jimmy, you’re not the type to throw yourself on the floor and beg’, laughed G admiringly.

Jimmy shuffled uncomfortably in his seat, then gazed out of the window into space. ‘I just felt this is a win for the lot of us. She wasn’t prepared to give it either. She said it was ‘a knowledge too far’, but I stood firm. I told her straight I did. I talked her into it using me charm and here we are’.

Lukasz was still curious about one point and pressed, ‘Why us Jimmy? Why did she choose us?’ he probed.

Jimmy leant his head back slightly, stuck his jaw out and addressed group, ‘I have no idea, I think she said something about ‘the cream of the crop’. I wasn’t listening too much what with the glowing ball and all the magic going on. I don’t know if she meant me, or us. I don’t know if she meant I’m the cream of just the London crop or probably she meant in the whole universe. I can’t answer. But I can say we’re top drawer lads, I’ll tell you that’.

It was a motley crew indeed in those early days, the five of them. Tiger, Lukasz, Alain, G and Jimmy. Tiger was a suave looking Moor from a land far way. Dark of skin, clothed in a fine velvet jacket and silk cravat he certainly looked the part. An aspiring actor, he was charming of manner and a good team player, he had a natural flair for spinning DHV yarns and was well admired the rest of the team. Lukasz was an Easterner, a fashion designer by trade, friendly and eternally optimistic, and again, always interestingly dressed. Where both Lukasz and Tiger had a strong air of the ‘artist’, the other two were completely different. G and Alain were both high earning professionals. G was employed in the finance department of a bank, presented in a very clean cut and respectable way. The same could be said of Alain, who also worked also for banks. Jimmy sat in the middle of the four, literally and figuratively, being professionally employed as a well paid consultant while playing as a minstrel in his four piece zither ensemble.

As the train rolled into Clapham Junction the knaves were in fine spirits. Usually these lads would be the lowest of the low, the cheap cuts of meat, but tonight, with their new found magical powers and a year of pickup experience crammed into their heads… well they were STILL the lowest of the low, but they were confident they could finagle, cheat and misrepresent their way into an unsuspecting maiden’s under garments with their well coordinated wild exaggerations game.

Jimmy was jubilant, ‘who needs real value now we can present ourselves as if we had real value?’

‘We’re a well honed seduction team’, Alain continued as they leapt from the train to the platform at Clapham Junction, ‘It’s all about the team work, every bar has it’s own dynamic and we set the dynamic in our favour early on. It’s half the battle, the rest is just a matter of flickin’ a few switches. As long as we don’t stand on each other’s toes and we all get a fair bite at the apples, we can usually pull something out. We’re highly calibrated and expertly socially aware’.

Five abreast and holding up 100 angry passengers behind them, they strutted their way along platform six and out into the street. Snow caked the ground and the cold bit into their lips and fingers. Someone on the corner was eating a mince pie. The cold had emptied the streets and filled the taverns. Each tavern like an island of festive energy, warmth and mulled wine, a refuge from the seasonal elements. Occasionally the doors opened and revellers inside would spill into the street, bringing with them a blast of warm air and seasonal melody from the celebrations inside. Mulled wine was being sold. People were eating mince pies.

The knaves now knew that finding a decent tavern was the first challenge to ye olde night game. You need an environment with enough people and traffic for the opportunity to mingle. It needs enough people to host enough suitable maidens for five hapless lads, but it can’t be so loud as to make conversation too difficult. It should also have a good balance of seating and standing areas, for you need the standing areas to be mobile and move easily around groups, but the seated areas are necessary for retreating to later on for a more intimate opportunity for conversation. It’s not just hit and hope all this bar game. The seasoned and sophisticated seducer knows well these crucial elements that play their part in a fertile night game environment.

Passing one tavern, a door suddenly flung open and as a group of drunken girls exited, staggering and giggling, they gave the merry men a glimpse of what lay inside.

‘This place is perfect’, Jimmy yelped. ‘It’s got drunk skirt and still got its ornamental reindeer up’.

‘Then the night is ours’, cheered Tiger. ‘Let’s go to work’.

Tiger bounded inside as the rest of the crew bustled down the steps behind him. It turned out they had chosen a ‘country inn’ style tavern, a warm place with lots of space to move around and perfectly low level music. There was even a log fire still adorned with holly and ivy, but now New Year’s banners also hung from the ceiling. The knaves had chosen expertly well.

Upon his entrance Jimmy saw a maiden indeed fair. Tall and slim, dark hair, pretty features, tight fitting dark blue jeans and a quality looking tan leather jacket. She sat at the bar talking to a chubby lad and close by them was a seated cluster of men and women who could possibly have been part of their group.

‘That right there’, said Jimmy, ‘is a tidy bit of crumpet. If she’s not an 8, and she’s not, then she’s not far off and she’ll be an 8 when I write the field report. A properly turned out piece of cherry tart and no mistake. I bet she’s got all her own teeth! I don’t care what you do, but that’s my target lads’.

Tiger placed his hand on his shoulder. ‘You know the rules Jimmy’, he reminded. ‘If you can get us into any set; you have your pick of the skirt in that set and we’ll help you if we can. Until then, everything is open. It’s the same for everyone.’

Alarmed that one of the other knaves might bag his favoured skirt, Jimmy made a bee line for the target; he had his best line ready. ‘Ow pissed are ‘yer? Fancy a fumble in the bogs’, but at the last moment Alain hauled him back.

‘Jimmy, are you forgetting yourself, we have style and sophistication now. Slowly, slowly catch a monkey. Don’t say that thing about a fumble in the bogs for God’s sake. We’re not in the Squid now’.

Jimmy tugged at the lapels on his tunic to compose himself. ‘You’re right Alain, catch a monkey, just testin’ ‘yer. The first thing we need to do is build a bit of a vibe, not look like the kind of scum that shark bars for loose skirt and easy sex. I hate those types. We’ve got look like….’. Jimmy paused looking for the words.

‘Normal, well adjusted men?’, G contributed.

‘Anything but what we actually are?’, Lukasz added.

‘No’, countered Jimmy impatiently, ‘We’ve got to make them think we’re actually attractive. We do that by doing what we’re doing now, not surveying the room for skirt, but all sort of facing each other and having what looks like a good conversation. Let’s spend five minutes setting up a good vibe and give them a chance to notice us’.

Tiger nodded in agreement, ‘While you’re all doing that, I’ll go and see if I can get us some pawns’.

‘Great ides, Tiger’, Jimmy added, his gaze still hanging on his target, ‘Sweet and sour sauce on the side and a bit of spice and garlic on mine’.

Tiger shook his head. ‘A pawn set’, he clarified. He rolled his eyes to the roof, ‘for the central character you aren’t half a buffoon at times, Jimmy’.

‘Yes well, for now, I am the comic relief as well as well as the hero’ Jimmy admitted sadly, ‘according to the crone the comic relief in this crew doesn’t really come until we meet Robusto in 2009’. Jimmy pointed at his watch as if to highlight the hopeless passage of time he was up against. ‘Aye, in 2009, we’ll see world class buffoonery indeed, but until then, it’s me’.

Tiger and Lukasz peeled away. Their grand plan was harder than it sounded but a staple of night game. They intended to separate from the main group and try and pick off some low hanging fruit. A pawn set. This would generally be a group of 2 or 3 averagely pretty girls who are chatty in nature and willing to talk and have fun. They would ideally be an easy enough set to get into that might be glad for the attention, but they have to be hot enough to not be a discredit to the group. Pawns may or may not be up for anything romantic, but for either party it doesn’t matter too much. The worst case scenario is the girls may be milking the players for laughs and validation, but the players are in turn diluting the cock heavy nature of their group. To a casual observer, a group of 5 guys is a group on the hunt, while a group of 5 guys and 3 girls is a fun party. Pulling in a couple of easy pawns early on became a staple routine back in the day. Sometimes the pawns turned out to be alright and a decent consolation prize if you fall short and miss your targets.

With pawns and an improved vibe it can become easier to merge into and open other sets. The choice of the word ‘pawn’ relates to the idea you can trade the girl off, sacrifice her up front to get closer to what you really want later. Consider this example, often guys go out with female friends but want to meet girls themselves. Let’s say there are six flatmates on a night out, three girls and three guys. If a male from adjacent group starts a conversation, the guys may sense an attempt to ‘get one of their women’ and even though they’re not dating the girls, it can get their backs up. Even though they’re not ‘with’ the women, they’re still getting the blunt end of the deal and are less likely to be on your side. However, if the guy approaching is also in a group with girls, then there is a potential trade on the cards. ‘You get to speak to my skirt and I get to speak to yours’. You’re bringing value to the table in a trade, rather than manipulatively trying to take. The guys in the target set probably won’t think it through rationally like this, they’ll just see girls they can meet easily and take the bait. They’re much more likely to be on your side or drop their guard if they think there is something on a plate for them.

As long as there are girls around and you’re having fun and not doing anything to actually lower your value, then you’ll do OK in night game.

With Tiger and Lukasz gone, Jimmy, Alain and G positioned themselves next to the bar, close to a group of four student looking girls. Facing slightly away from the girls and talking amongst themselves, Jimmy’s gang looked like good mates having a good conversation, completely indifferent to who else may or may not be in the bar. In reality, they were looking over each other shoulders and describing to each other the skirt on offer, without having to look like they were scanning the bar for value.

‘Over Jimmy’s left shoulder’, G reported, ‘There’s a three set, but though one is really quite nice girl, the other two are rotters’.

‘I saw them as we came in’, Alain shuddered, ‘it’s an easy in I think. Talk to one of the gargoyles and they’ll rope the fit one in. I see that one Jimmy likes still talking to the guy over by that pumpkin lantern. Ate she’s nice, he’s a fat lad, but… a bit of a lad. I’m not sure what is going on there between them’.

Jimmy was impatient to make his first play. ‘See those fellas at the bar by close by my target set. See he’s got a Leeds United gym bag down by his feet. I’ve been on that game a few times. I’m going to talk to him and his crew. We can build a vibe and see if I can find a casual open on the fat lad’.

The set Jimmy referred to was a group similar to his own, five males. These guys weren’t out for girls in particular, they were out for drink. They looked like rugby boys. They were slightly boisterous but not unfriendly in any way. Despite it being an all male set, it was a good pick as Jimmy could very likely ingratiate himself with a group that looked ‘dangerous’, but were actually far from it. He could look like the guy who tames the bull. If Tiger and Lukasz turned up with some pawns in the next five minutes, then even better. The rugby lads would love them for that.

One could indeed cut out all this labour and go straight in for a girl, straight off the bat, with whatever value you carry with you. One might get lucky or might not. Alternatively, olde school bar game theorised that you could spend five minutes working an environment and raise the players’ value in everyone’s eyes, not just the targets’. With his value high and a party behind him, a player suddenly finds sets open much easier, or indeed they open him. It’s always possibly that someone else got into a target while a player was working his value up. That’s the trade off I guess. But it rarely happens and other men are easily handled. With a bit of game, after a while, other guys generally cease to be much of a challenge.

Jimmy got close enough to the rugby lads to hear their accents; he leant into the bar, ordered himself a drink and then casually noticed the gym bag.

‘Ere, are you lads from Leeds then?’ he beamed, pointing at the bag, ‘I’ve been ‘yon Elland Road loads of times, they’re a rum bunch all right them Leeds’.

‘He is, that monkey there’, a stocky drunk man with a red face and short dark hair pointed cheerfully at one of his companions. ‘He’s a Northern monkey from Huddersfield’.

‘Keep your eyes on your wallet’, another shouted.

The group laughed raucously and Jimmy stepped away from the bar, moving slightly closer to his target set. He wanted the banter and vibe of his new set to filter into the attention of his target. While the play he saw was that he could somehow bring the fat lad she was talking to into the cacophony, it didn’t really matter what the plan was, or even who the target currently was. All that really mattered was that now there was good energy and Jimmy was at the centre of it. He was having a laugh and he’d been in the bar less than 5 minutes.

The northern monkey looked grateful to have a fellow Northerner and asked Jimmy, ‘Are you from Yorkshire too?’

‘Worse!’, he said, then looking at the others he threw out his punchline, ‘I’m from Burnley’, he looked to the roof and shouted ‘keep your eyes on your wallet’.

That was all it took to set the laughter off. The group accepted Jimmy. G and Alain joined and general banter and discussion broke out between them all. Despite the fun times, the three knew, they never forgot, that they weren’t there for beer and daft talk; they were there for building a vibe and creating opportunities to meet nice girls. They didn’t know who or where yet, they just knew they had a platform cooking.

At that moment, Lukasz and Tiger returned with the four student girls from the aforementioned student set. It was perfect timing as a large group of guys was now blended in with several women. They now looked less like a rugby team and were a large mixed set, not too dissimilar from Jimmy’s target set. Laughing and joking loudly, they were the life and soul of the bar.

There was no real master-plan, no set game afoot. Just five guys with a rough idea of what they wanted and rules that let them know what was expected of them and what they could expect of each other. This was the important part, as it gave them a kind of telepathy. No matter what the conversation seemed to be about, the five all knew what the real state of play was.

1. The student pawns belonged to one of either Tiger or Lukasz. Any interaction with those girls would acknowledge that context.

2. The player (Tiger or Lukasz) may, or may not, want them as targets.

3. Jimmy was likely still trying to find an angle into the brunette and that’s why he’d set up this party set. It gave him no claim on the target set whatsoever, but as he’d done a good job getting the party started, most of the lads would probably give him a few moments leeway to work his way in.

4. The good vibe of the party set was a good springboard for everyone to open other sets now. They were the warm end of the pool in this bar. People were looking at them.

5. Again, until Jimmy actually opened up his target, he had no claim on her. If someone could get in there quicker and better, then good for them. It may be inconsiderate, but not actually against the rules. You couldn’t reserve targets; you had to do something to win them. It’s good for everyone as it spurs you into action.

6. You can rely on your wings to follow the rules, but not any other man.

There’s no need for jealousy in game because every player’s success benefits everyone else in the crew. Tiger and Lukasz pawn set reflected well on Jimmy. In turn, Tiger and Lukasz looked good to their set when they were able to say ‘oh we’re with those crazy guys over there, let’s go and meet them’. You can have the night from hell and go home empty handed while your wing gets the ‘10’. But if you’ve winged him well, that ‘10’ things you’re just as cool as he is, and she has friends. Game is not played just over a bar or even a night. It’s a castle you build brick by brick over months and maybe even years.

At this point chance played a card. Jimmy’s target stood up from her bar stool and took her jacket off, glancing around, she folded it over her arm. The fat man’s arms darted around the corners of the room. Jimmy guessed they were looking for the cloak room. He removed his jacket and walked over smiling.

‘Do you guys know where the cloak-room is?’, he asked.

‘She is looking for it’, said the fat lad. ‘I haven’t got a clue’.

‘Yeah’, Jimmy countered, ‘well I think I saw it on the way in, over there’.

It was as simple as that. Jimmy set off in the direction of the cloakroom and she followed. The door was now open, but crucially, as Jimmy left with the target, he saw G walking over and introducing himself to the fat lad. That is what a good wing does.

1. Stops the fat lad following, giving the player a chance to work.
2. Opportunity to befriend and bring all her friends into the group.
3. Opportunity to DHV the player.

Knowing that when they returned from the cloakroom, the target set would be likely merged with his own; there was less pressure to actively game too his target too much. G had, in that one play, bought Jimmy probably half an hour to work. The five minutes at the cloakroom was neither here nor there. Jimmy used that five minutes to be fun, casual and indifferent to the targets hotness.

‘Pleased to meet you, I’m Jimmy by the way’.

‘I’m Carly’, she beamed.

Jimmy seemed not to hear, ‘The secret to a good New Year’s Eve, in my opinion, is to not try hard. Don’t expect much, just enjoy being with your friends’, he cooed, as if speaking to himself.

‘I agree, we came here because it was the only place we could have a quiet drink’.

Jimmy nodded knowingly, ‘are they all your flatmates then?’ (an obvious variant of ‘so how do you guys know each other’).

‘Some are’, she said. ‘The three girls at the table, we all live in Putney together. The big guy with the dark hair and the white shirt, he is Rod, he’s Claire’s fiance. The rest of them are all Rod’s friends’.

Jimmy imagined the conversation that set this night out up. ‘Hey Rod, see if Claire’s mates want to come out on new years with us. They’re nice looking girls, I wouldn’t mind getting to know them’.

Jimmy presumed there was nothing too serious between the fat boy and Carly, but that he was probably fancying his chances. The last thing he wanted to do too soon was to get anyone’s back up and shut the set down. Best to build value slowly, push those attraction switches and make yourself the favourite under the radar. You don’t need to be talking to a target to be building attraction. All she has to do is overhear or witness your game and attraction will be built. In fact, it can work a bomb if the target is not getting face time with you.

Imagine you’re at a party and there’s a super hot girl you like. Imagine she does a sexy dance. You witness it, but it’s not for you. The fact it’s not for you may doesn’t make it less attractive. It maybe makes it more attractive. You wished it were for you. Being on the outside looking in makes one very hungry. That’s the kind of desire you’re trying to generate in targets. I once got a girl’s number at a private party by never speaking to her. It was on one of Lukasz works night outs. As an experiment, I followed her around all night and spoke loudly enough for hear to hear all my DHV stories. At the end of the night she walked over and gave me her phone number. I dated her for 3 months.

By the time the Jimmy and Carly returned to the main group, a lot of integration had taken place. G had brought the fat boy into a conversation with himself and Alain and the Northern monkey from Leeds was now with Carly’s flatmates. Leeds and the flatmates seemed to be getting along like a house on fire, so the knaves figured why not just let him do the ground work for a while and swoop in later if the mood took them. Everyone was laughing and talking, it was a perfect free for all. The crew had been in the bar probably less than twenty minutes and they’d merged three sets and now had 6 immediate targets. When they came in they knew no one.

Reporting back to Alain, Jimmy motioned his arm, ‘these girls are flatmates. She’s engaged to him and the rest is open play I think. The blokes are all mates of the groom’.

‘Subtle this Jimmy’, Alain smiled. ‘All this was done by being chatty and friendly and nothing more. No-one has hit on anyone yet, no-one has offered to buy any drinks and no-one has signalled they are on the hunt. No openers, no magic tricks. It’s sophisticated and subtle game. I am beginning to think I could actually be a better man in time’.

‘Aye’, said Jimmy. ‘She fancies me that girl. It’s time to ask for that fumble in the bogs’.

‘No!’, exclaimed Alain, pulling him back, then patiently drawing breath, ‘We’re set up here. There’s no need to rush. Just find a girl you like and go over, build a bit of attraction. Demonstrate your admirable values, get her to chase’.

‘Well done Alain, you passed my test. Of course that’s what I intend to do. I’ll demonstrate my admirable values and get old Jimmy chased for a change’.

Jimmy liked the sound of being chased for a change. Why should he do all the hard work all the time? He was a man of high value now. He still lived in a pokey little room in the bad end of town, still slept in an unmade bed on a mattress on the floor, still wore the same clothes he was wearing when he was 17 and for a reason he never fully understood, most days he smelled faintly of cabbage. But all that that was just circumstances. Take it aside and you couldn’t convince him now there was much difference between himself and his hero Cary Grant.

He saw Carly talking to Claire, Tiger and one of the student girls. He made eye contact with Tiger then a few seconds later casually sailed past.

‘Ah, Jimmy’, shouted Tiger, ‘Just the man. Girls, have you met my best mate Jim’, he lowered his voice playfully as if telling a great secret and whispered, ‘one of the best rock and roll singers in London’.

For ten minutes, Jimmy and Tiger bounced off each other, they’d ask the girls questions to find out what interests the girls had, then playfully tease the girls and find ways to tell humorous stories of things they’d done.

‘Ah you like rock climbing. Adventure sports. You’re like the Lara Croft of Clapham, only drunker. Jimmy remember the time we were in Malaga and we went bungee jumping’.

They came across exactly as they actually were, two good friends with a shared history of adventure and, at heart, men of good values. A veneer of bad boy enough to be interesting, but really below that, decent guys who you want to be around because you want to be a part of their next stories. The girls clearly liked them. No longer strangers in a bar, they were shiny new friends with great lives. Carly in turn was not a party girl, she was polite and friendly, she worked as a school teacher and liked to sail boats and paint in her spare time. When she mentioned her artistic aspirations, Jimmy felt it was time to single her out and notice her.

‘That’s very interesting Miss… Carly? You’re an artist. Now tell me, are you a great artist or do you just throw some paper and a soup can on the floor and take a photo?’

She laughed and said, ‘No, I paint and I like to make mosaics out of glass and stone. I do pottery too. I’ve got my own pottery wheel’.

‘That’s good. It’s good for the character to have an artistic streak, makes someone interesting and it gives us something to do on the Sunday when the pubs are shut’.

‘So you play in a band?’, she laughed.

‘It’s not so much a big deal’, Jimmy waved his arm dismissively, ‘you know these guys all really love it and to hear them you’d think we’re the next U2, but we’re just another middle of the road London rock band. To be honest, I’m like you, I’m more than happy with my job. I do well. I think full time rock and roll would be too much fast living for me’.

‘Oh, so what do you do?’

‘I build IT networks for law firms and banks. I don’t do the actual work, I manage a team of engineers. I make sure the work gets done properly. It’s a lot of responsibility, but my boss and I get on really well. I don’t even see it as work really’. Jimmy paused and said, ‘In fact, fuck it, I love it so much, I’m going to to go the office right now’.

He feigned to leave and Carly pulled him back laughing, saying, ‘you talk like a proper Northerner, don’t you’.

At this point the Rod and the fat lad came to join them. It was entirely understandable. Their women were engrossed in conversation with some other men so they had a duty to check it out. Interruptions are a part and parcel of game, especially bar game. While often unwanted they can sometimes be used to your advantage. For one, they give you some time and space to work out the next play. For now, Jimmy focused his attention on Rod and the fat lad. He dropped all his focus on Carly and put it on the guys. He betrayed no disappointment that he just wanted to talk to Carly and he didn’t try to get it back to just her and him at the first opportunity. On the contrary, he was genuine and enthusiastic in his interactions with the men. He sold it well. He let them know he had nothing to hide and gave the impression that he was just as happy to laugh and joke with guys as he was girls. He also knew any DHV he delivered to Rod (and winning Rod over was a DHV in itself) would be heard by Carly. An interrupt is often not an interrupt. Just a change of play. Jimmy saw this as a chance to follow the maxim ‘lead the men and the women will follow’.

Jimmy knew at this point it was going well, he liked Carly and she liked him. He recognised that he’d have to pass the night in and out of her company to make sure he kept her interest and he’d have to make sure he got a chance to discreetly get her number well before she left, so he couldn’t leave that until the last minute and have to do it with all her friends waiting.

This timing concern woke him up after a while. The night was wearing on and there were other people in the bar. You can’t let things go too cold. You do at some point have to hit on your target. Just do it when you know she’s interested. After a while the obvious next step came to Jimmy’s scheming little mind.

He saw Lukasz and the lad from Huddersfield still dancing and flirting with the student girls from the pawn set. One of the girls was a cute, small blonde who seemed to be loving all the big Pole’s attention. He drifted over to Lucasz and greeted him warmly. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Alain sidle up to Carly and introduce himself.

‘Hey, I need a bit of Luke time as well, it’s not New Year without a sprinkling of my perfect Polish pal’.

‘Guys this is my friend Jimmy’. Lukasz announced, ‘Or as we call him ‘Mr. New Year’s Eve’.

‘Ding dong, ding dong!’, Jimmy said, wobbling his head.

It was the kind of meaningless waffle that you can just say in set and if the vibe is right and everyone will laugh. Lukasz had these girls so pumped up that he had exactly that vibe. He didn’t seem to need any help in this set, they would laugh at anything. The Huddersfield lad seemed to have a cool vibe of his own too and was clearly more than capable of rolling along and following Lukasz lead. Jimmy could have stuck bread-sticks up his nose and they’d have all thought it was high comedy. They lapped the tomfoolery up like hungry kittens. Out of the corner of his eye, Jimmy could see Alain still talking to Carly. He was smiling knowingly and gesticulating, while looking over in Jimmy’s direction. Carly’s eye’s were transfixed. Jimmy knew what was going on. Before game, this would have been a bad sign. Not now.

‘I don’t want to crash your set Luke’, he whispered, ‘but I need a jealousy plot-line’. ‘She’s into me is that Carly, but I got interrupted and it’s staled out a bit. I need a bit more juice to get it over the line’.

‘Dance with this blonde’, Lukasz pointed, ‘she’s just brilliant, watch this.

“HADOUKEN”’, he shouted as he imitated Ken and Ryu’s power move from Street Fighter II, blasting the blonde with an imaginary ball of firy energy. The blonde threw her arms in the air and repeated ‘HOW DO KEN’ while her friends fell about laughing.

‘OK, she can sing, she can shake, but… can she dance?’, Jimmy taunted. He grabbed her hand and raised it, the blonde span around like a top under his arm. Predictably, everyone laughed. Jimmy wondered if they’d been smoking pot.

‘That’ll do’, Jimmy said smiling. He set off to walk away, then, as an afterthought, remembering wing etiquette, he returned and pointing to Lukasz announced to the girls, ‘this man taught me everything I know… about… err… wrestling crocodiles’.

‘You wrestle crocodiles?’, the blonde asked wide eyed.

As Jimmy left he let his eye’s meet Carly’s by chance. She was standing with Alain and her friends and had obviously been waiting for Jimmy to leave his set. She smiled at him as he looked up and walked up to them. He laughed and said to them ‘Half an hour until New Year guys’. Then turning to Carly, ‘another year of perfect paint and pottery for you, I suppose?’

The interaction now just felt different. After the fear of loss it was almost as if Carly had decided, ‘if I get the chance again, I am going to make sure I take it’. The returning from the other set had also seemed to have proven to and assured Carly that Jimmy was someone she could count on. The fact everyone liked him wouldn’t distract him from the fact he liked her. Everything that happened between them after this point was a forgone conclusion. The swapping of numbers, the date. The relationship that lasted several months. None of that needed to be gamed out. The game part was done as soon as he returned from that Lukasz set. All that needed to be said was ‘you’re a really nice woman. You and me, we’re going to go out for a drink later this week’ and they were set on their course.

The social dynamics management part of Mystery Method is really only required while you’re getting a target’s attention. Night game is a lot of plotting and strategy, setting up social dynamics in your favour in order to deliver sometimes just a few words. The whole point of game is that it gives you the means to raise your value in those early moments before you approach and before you make your intentions clear. It’s easier to sell a product someone already wants or that they have been considering, than to sell the idea cold. Create the desire, then make the sale.

Back in the day a lot of non game friends told me that Mystery Method was unnecessary over thinking and that you could ‘just walk over and say ‘hello’ and not waste all the time’. But none of these guys were regularly dating particularly hot girls. They certainly weren’t dating more than one or two decent looking girls a year. The truth of it that I saw was that for most guys, they would just be yet another guy saying ‘hello’ and that doesn’t bear much fruit. We’d go out as a game crew and after a while, most nights at least one if us would get something really good. I didn’t see these results from non game friends. I just saw a lot of claims to game being ‘easy’ and ‘you just say hello’, but I didn’t see the results.

But none of that really mattered to me. Night game is a great team game and we were a team. We liked the over-thinking. We liked the game. The best part of the pickup in this story was when I spoke to Alain a few days later as we had coffee in Wimbledon, where we both lived. I asked him what he said about me to Carly while I was doing the jealously plot-line with the blonde girl and he just laughed and said, ‘oh God you know. The usual stuff’. It didn’t really need to be explained or confirmed what he did. He just did what we did. We looked out for each other and played our roles. Truth is, win, lose or draw we were having the time of our lives and we knew it.

You can find Jimmy at his blog here