Ein Kleines Nachtspiel

I posted recently about being in Budapest with Lee and having to recall how to do night game. It took us a few minutes to remember what to do. It felt like we were Mermaid Man and Barnacle Boy, two old gimmers long past their youthful best, unable to do what previously had come so easily in their youth.

Well I have been in Warsaw for the last three weeks. That’s in Poland that is. I went to meet a student of mine. ‘Nick from Newcastle’, we’ll call him. We do get together from time to time as ‘friends’, but really, I just feel sorry for him and he needs my coaching. What can I say, the man needs me? He’d be lost without me.

I keep him on the straight and narrow. How squalid his life would get without me coaxing him back onto the straight and narrow from time to time, I dread to think, but it would be pretty squalid.

But joking aside, I hadn’t seen Nick in a long while and it was a lot of fun to see him again. Bodi came by for the last week and it was the icing on the cake. It was like it was 2012 all over again. By the time my student came over for 5 days infield coaching, we were cooking on gas and it was a big spike of fun and frolics for a whole week.

So one Saturday night, I was sitting around my Polish Airbnb twiddling my thumbs. It was just after Nick took a few days off in Kiev, just before Bodi and the student turned up.  I was in a funny old apartment. It was from the 1930s, the decor hadn’t changed since then. It was pretty ancient and it was underground. So dingy and antiquated. I don’t mind that, but early Saturday afternoon, I needed to get out.

So seeking some thrills, I hit the bars. My aim was simply to sup on some cheap cocktails and meet some people. I was alone, but as we all know, game is a skill-set you carry with you that can quickly score you friends wherever you go.

Not to hunt skirt, just to socialise and have a good night, I found myself at 9pm, Saturday night, walking into a bar alone. I glanced around, noted the surroundings and said to myself exactly what I used to say at the beginning of every boot-camp back in the day. ‘Let’s go to work’.

The bar was half the size and shape of a tennis court. It had music, but not loud. It had about 20 people in it. The serving area was against the long wall opposite the door. It was about half male and half female. The hottest girl was a blonde in her late 20s in dark rimmed glasses. She sat with a friend at a table against the far wall. At the bar were two 6s. Then a few scattered mixed sets.

So my first job was to social proof. I walked to the bar, asked the 6s if I could take one of their cocktail menus, glanced at the drinks and ordered myself a vodka Red Bull.

I’d seeded the 6s with my presence. They’d likely make a good pawn set when the time came. But for now, I need to build a bit more value. I don’t want to get a cold shoulder too early and burn the bar. So I waited for a mixed set to come into range. What I wanted to do was create a slight buzz around me and let the whole bar, including my seeded pawn set, see me being popular and having fun.

It didn’t take long. Within a few minutes two well dressed guys walked in, planted themselves next to me at the bar and waited to get served.

‘Guys, get in here, get to the bar’, I said, as I made way for them to get in front of me. Nods were exchanged and a few pleasantries. The guys were from France and they were warm to me joining their group. I pulled away, checked my phone and sent signals to them that I wasn’t desperate for company.

After a few moments it was time to act.

‘Lads, can I ask you a favour? It’s a bit of an odd one’.

‘Sure what’s up?’

I told them my friend was back at the hotel and saying he was going to stay in. I told them I wanted to coax him out. I wanted to What’s App him a photo, get him out of his bed on a Saturday night.

So now the three of us were pausing for photos, clinking glasses and laughing. We’re in full swing now, just having a conversation, ‘what brings you to Warsaw’ etc.

• Any question they ask me, I answer in a DHV, because I know the potential pawn set can hear me. This is why it’s SO important that bars aren’t loud. Bars in London are far too loud.

• Those photos of me clinking glasses with two suave looking guys, they’re DHV photos. Straight up to Facebook the next morning ‘new friends in Warsaw’ or What’s App them to targets.

At this point two girls new come up to the bar. Low 7s. I’d seen one of them watching me so I just looked at her (Red 7) and said;

‘You’re not Polish are you’

It didn’t matter what I said, she’d been watching me and she was a low 7. It’s a new pawn set, it’s keen, so I decide to take advantage. I only need her around so that I am not a chode without a girl. I don’t need a big win here, just for her to talk to me. She’s been watching me and I’ve enough value now to rely on an easy open.

It was a five minute conversation. Basic set. Light DHVs, get her jumping through a few hoops, then I introduce her to my French friends. She told me she was a French teacher so it was an easy merge. Now I’m the guy who brings people together. At this point, I’m becoming the focal point of the bar.

I have Red 7 in my pocket. In the real world, not ‘Jimmy’s got a girlfriend world’, I can take her number at any point. She’s a low 7, 20 year old redhead. A pawn set but a decent consolation prize should I go home empty handed. But my job now is to use the pawn set to propel myself into a good target set. That would be the blonde in the dark rimmed glasses I mentioned.

Red 7. Something like this.

At this point, I have a spot of luck. I’m now in a solid merged set. The French guys like me as I am bringing them girls. The girls like me as I am cool. But what happens next sky rockets my value in the bar. A guy walks in wearing the most amazing fancy dress costume I ever saw. It was an Imperial Scout from Star Wars. Not a Storm Trooper, an Imperial Scout. This guy it turns out worked in the theatre as a costume designer and he’d made the outfit himself. It was perfect. Blast marks, the lot. It was good enough to be in the film. Complete with replica blaster.

I wanted a photo with him, so I left my set; I bought him and his girlfriend a round of drinks and told him my nephew loved Star Wars. I was with them for five minutes; we had photos and talked about our jobs.

He was an impressive guy. I was pleased to meet him and I was blown away by his craftsmanship. If anyone ever wants a replica Star Wars outfit, then PM me and I can send you his details, because his work is second to none.

So now I am the guy who is high fiving the Imperial Scout and his hot girlfriend. Red 7 is looking over smiling (it’s a text book take away, I’ve moved on and the pawn wants me back) and more importantly, the blonde target set is now watching me as I knock back shots with the Empire.

At this point I am about one hour in. It’s quite an investment, especially given that at any moment, any set can decide to leave the bar and thus I lose a lot of my investment, especially if it’s the target set. This is one of the huge drawbacks to bar game. You can’t dally; you have to strike while the iron is hot.

As I walk past Red 7 I say ‘hi’ and she invites me to join her and her friends. I note a friendly looking guy and hippy gal has joined her. I tell her I’ll join them later and I go to the bathroom. I don’t want to join her set seated just yet. It’s harder to work the bar when you’re seated, I still have a lot of capital elsewhere and I don’t want to be on the outskirts of a conversation between 4 good friends.

So I go to the bathroom, talk to a few people in the queue and return to the bar. I buy another drink and talk to some people nearby.

At this point I see the target blonde walking over to me. She’s left her friend and is heading to the bar so I take my chance.

Not quite as highly placed as this, but close.

Now, I don’t need an opinion opener. I don’t need to come in under the radar here. I KNOW she has been watching me. She’s seen me laughing, taking photos, clinking glasses, being the centre of attention, looking good and mixing with the Imperial Scout. Everyone in the bar wanted a photo with the cunt; but I was getting to know HIM and his girlfriend, not the suit. I wasn’t using him for a quick photo.

She walks right up to the bar, stands right next to me and looks ahead. She is clearly waiting for me to talk to her. So I just say:

‘Now YOU’RE an elegant looking lady’.

It was the truth. I was only telling her the truth. She stuck with me for 20 minutes listening to my DHVs before I sent her back to her friend. ‘I don’t want your friend to be on her own’.

It’s a ballsy move. It’s the kind of gamble you find you have to take at times in bar game. She was the hottest girl in the bar and she was into me. I just sent her away. I know it’s a hot set and I know in real life (if I was out to score) I’d have about 10 minutes to make some quick decisions.

Now something else happened. A new group joined the bar. 4 very cool looking, well dressed Turkish guys with a 8. The new hottest girl in the bar. The new target. My senses were becoming dulled by the vodkas, but I was in high spirits for now and was revelling in pulling the strings.

The new target set positioned near the door. I returned to my central position and as luck would have it, the guy from the Red 7 set was at the bar so I introduced myself.

‘Ah, you’re from Italy! I am friends with Kasha’.

I roped the guy into conversation, bought a tray of shots (£5) and reignited red 7 as a pawn set. I told stories about my Italian drummer, when I did a tour of Italy, how I love Lucio Battisti. I had the set rapt for as long as I needed. Turkish 8 saw the whole thing and heard a lot of my DHVs.

Then my hard work started to pay off. Two things happened, right in front of Turkish 8 and she saw the whole thing.

The blonde target walked past me and gave me her number, in full sight of the whole bar. Then the Imperial Scout returned. He came in, high fived me, chatted to me, then bought me a beer and went into the corner with his girlfriend.

Using my peripheral vision I could see Turkish 8, watching me. Let’s consider what she saw:

A chatty, well dressed English guy talking about when he toured Italy in his band. A group of 4 people standing with him and laughing. A hot girl throws her phone number at him. An Imperial Scout walks in, high fives him and buys him a beer.

I stick with my Italians and keep an eye on the new target set. The Italians invite me for lunch on Sunday. I give them my number. The guy takes my number as do all the girls. Red 7 immediately texts me there and then to ‘test the number is right’.

That’s the Red 7 and Blonde spectacles collected. Now remember, I am doing all this with one hand tied behind my back. I am not asking for numbers, just passing my time. I am not running comfort, I am not telling girls ‘look, I really do fancy you, we should do coffee tomorrow’, I am without the two crucial weapons in the pickup arsenal – verbal and physical escalation. It’s all value game, push/pull and social dynamics, in other words – all attraction. It’s all arms length and very stand-offish. I don’t have any desire to cheat on my girl, especially not with girls who are a couple of points below her.

Bad luck! The Turkish 8 leaves the bar with her set. So I simply leave and follow them at a distance. The bar I was in was in an open air market courtyard, a little like the Camden markets in London. It’s really like one big open air nightclub with separate bars. So I tracked the new target set to their new bar which was two doors away. I hung back, saw them head in, waited a moment and walked in.

I immediately saw the guys, but the skirt was nowhere to be seen. No problem. My plan was to get a drink, open the guys and be in the target’s set by the time she turned up. But first I was playing a hunch. She’d be in the queue for the bathroom.

I headed down the steps and there was a queue. And there, right at the end of the queue, staring up wide eyed as I descended down the stairs was Turkish 8. I glanced past her, joined the queue, casually let my eyes meet hers and said gruffly: ‘Hey. I’m Jimmy Jambone’.

Pretty accurate comparison. Obviously this is a pro photo.

The deal was done. I’d sealed my reputation in the previous bar. I seeded a few DHVs for a while, went into the mens’ room, went back upstairs and waited. I worked a few more sets, to pawn off. All guys. Got them chatting and laughing. Before long the Turks noticed me and one of the guys opened me. Another spot of luck.

Invited into their set, I had an hour with them, working Turkish 8 in plain site of the set, under the radar. Mixing indifference to her with spiked DHVs. The guys were buying me drinks.

Now, I worked out there was no dating going on. I couldn’t work out how they all knew each other, I wasn’t getting very straight answers. Only that they all were doing Erasmus. Turkish 8 turned out to be Polish and from Lodz and going back to Lodz the next day. The guys were all Turkish and were flying back to Turkey in the morning.

One of the Turks, the coolest guy, the guy who bought me drinks, was clearly working her. Standing very close in isolation and talking close to her ear. Very close body language. She wasn’t reciprocating. I got the impression she had been but was keeping him on ice as long as I was there.

She in fact isolated me. We spoke in isolation for 5 minutes and she asked me straight out, ‘do you want to come clubbing with us tonight’.

• That’s a step too far. Knowingly working some social dynamics to my favour in a bar is bad enough, but going to a club in the knowledge that a girl is trying to get with me… that’s a step too far.
• I liked the Turkish guy. Why should I jack his set just for kicks when I had no intention of doing anything. If I was playing for keeps fair enough, but for me this was a pre season friendly. For him, it was the real thing. He was going for the lay and I liked him. Who knows, they could be married three years from now. They looked good together. I didn’t want to get in the way of that.
• Clubbing! I am 38!!

I declined, so she took my number.

I hung around a while longer then did the Irish goodbye. Got home at 4am.

The next day I had enthusiastic What’s App messages from Red 7 and Turkish 8. I ignored them and of course never texted the Blonde in glasses. I have no idea if those leads would have ever gone anywhere in the real world, but it was not a bad haul for a guy on ice. Not quite a Sidney Crosby, but not as bad as a Shayne Gostibehere.

The forgotten, irrepressible, almighty power of the DHV

I’ve realised lately that when it comes to pickup, I am now one of the old guard. I’m 38 and I started practicing game as a science over 10 years ago. All the things I did that were green, naive and in the moment are now firmly in the realms of history. My battle stories tend to all start ‘oh this was about 7 years ago, we were in this bar and…’ I suppose I am a 1^st gen PUA. I was born into pickup on the 1^st of January 2006. That’s not even a year after ‘The Game’ was first published. The Mystery Method was first published after I started ‘sarging’.

Today, particularly after my two year blackout and the fact I live mostly well outside London and more often than not end up in tiny towns with no game community whatsoever (Bolton, Warrington, Cheltenham, Weybridge), I have no connection whatsoever with the current pickup landscape. I couldn’t name more a single popular blogger (outside those I know personally from my past) nor could I comment on any of the current game theories which pass as ‘how to’ guides.

So I may be well off the mark here, but some things do get back to me, on the grape vine. Since I started coaching again 12 months ago I’ve had ten students. Not one has known what a DHV is. Days into the training schedule I realise that when I’ve talked about attraction switches, they’ve been nodding along but they don’t know really what I am talking about.

The theory is that skirt has evolved to prefer certain male character traits. These traits generally boil down to the message ‘this guy gets can bring you resources’. This isn’t cod theory cooked up on the forums and blogs in the minds of the pseudo ‘MPUAs’ that hang out there. It’s science. It’s actual tested and peer reviewed long established scientific theory. Skirt that didn’t select for successful males died and those genes didn’t pass on. Skirt that chose winners survived, the ‘winner selecting gene set’ passed on.

What this means is skirt have deep inside their psyches preferences over which they have little choice. In the same way guys can’t help but react to pictures like this one here on the left, girls can’t help but react to indications that a man has got his shit together. What this means is: There are switches you can hit which will make you attractive to her. Attraction is not a choice, it’s a biological response. You can’t help jumping nervously when you hear a twig snap behind you (genetically programmed fight or flight) and DHVing triggers a genetically programmed response, like it or not.

That’s the theory anyway and if it’s true, it’s incredibly powerful.

So when I am told that some current game theory advises us not to tell girls much about ourselves in set, I am surprised. I am sure it’s correct and properly field tested and the guys who are saying this are getting laid very regularly with top quality women. It’s just 100% contrary to my experience.

I talk a lot about conversation being the engine room of pickup. Open, stack, converse. The open is purely designed to get someone’s firm attention. The stack is purely designed to hit some quick attraction and move things away from the limited rapport building opportunity of the opener into the much more fertile ground of a conversation.

The conversation is really where the game begins and it’s the hardest part. Stopping and stacking is easy to master. Dates are easy to master. Seduction is easy to master. The conversation is where you pick her up. That’s where you’re a pickup artist.

And a big part of the conversation, but by no means the whole part, is the DHV. Talking about and giving insight into your life is incredibly fertile ground for doing this (also for building rapport). So to work a set without talking about yourself seems to me to be trying to play football… but refusing to use your feet.

So a story springs to mind that demonstrates just how powerful and fruitful it can be to learn how to flick those deeply ingrained and genetically programmed attraction switches by talking about your life. Ignore them to your detriment. This story as always is 100% true. It’s not even embellished slightly for dramatic or comic effect.

I once picked up one of my girlfriends, someone I actually *dated, without saying a word to her. I didn’t say a word to her. I was never in a conversation with her. I was never even talking to her group at any point. I got her number in a bar without even opening a set.

It was the early days of the whole thing. It was pre Sarge School, the precursor to RSG. I wasn’t running boot-camps at this time. I know because I remember the crew I was with. That night I was with Perry and a guy called Tiger. Tiger disappeared from the crew a good few months before Ace came along and made Sarge School happen, but that’s another story.

We were in a bar near Old Street, Ziegfried’s it was called. It’s possibly still there now. It was at one point considered one of the most happening joints in London. It was OK. I did a few gigs there. In fact, I think it’s the bar where I last played live.

Perry was having some kind of get together with his social circle. It was a vague collection of his colleagues from the fashion industry. He was still new to London so was not yet as well known and well liked as he eventually became. He was an acknowledged outsider. We went to the party to pickup.

We found the party quite difficult. The crowd was hard to get into. Three males who were outsiders weren’t a particularly attractive proposition. Perry got us into a few easy sets but we were politely tolerated and quickly shut out.

There was one chick there. She turned out to be an actress, and not a pretend one. She’d done some proper stuff and she’d had some bit parts in some TV shows. She’d been in a cop series. I can’t remember which one. She’d played a gangster’s stripper girlfriend. She’d been in a few episodes before her character wound up dead. She wasn’t as hot as she sounds.  I’ll be honest she was a low 7, getting into a 6 as the years advanced. Late 20s. Slim, great body, OK face. You wouldn’t say no but you wouldn’t street stop her.

7s and below aren’t game. But it doesn’t matter, for this is just a demonstration of how DHV stories affect skirt.

So I couldn’t get into set, but I liked this one chick. She wasn’t attention whoring, she seemed friendly, genuine and intelligent. I just chose her as a target and went for it. I focussed my attentions on this target while knowing that if I didn’t get a bite, there was a fair chance a secondary target might react.

So I just stood next to her party, just far enough away to seem like I wasn’t trying to be heard, but close enough so that I was within earshot. Perry and Tiger knew exactly what my plan was, it was a good experiment, so we went for it. My set, my target. I am player, they are wing. Game is on.

And we started, Perry and Tiger set me up and I knocked them in. It was very subtle. It lasted several hours. It was subtle. We’d talk for 5 minutes about a subject and the DHVs would steadily drip. Not non stop. Just once every five to ten minutes as I could appropriately fit them in.

We’d start a conversation about some subject and I’d just look to slip those messages in nice and steady, I had all the time in the world.

Talking about work I’d say things along the lines of the following:

‘Ever since my UBS victory I’ve been first in line for the next management vacancy’.

‘I like my job. I win a lot. It’s a career. It’s a passion’.

Talking about our plans for travel:

‘We could do Vegas again but no, we’re going to jump on our bikes and drive across France and Spain. I know a lot of people in Madrid, they’re always asking me to get down there’.

‘Everyone’s asking me to go on the ski trip but it’s Emily’s birthday, she’s 4. I’m not missing that for anyone’.

Drip, drip, drip. If she wasn’t listening someone was. As soon as I got IOI’s from anyone decent, I was going in. Then we’d all be in set.

It never went there. My target after a while walked over to get her coat, put it on and left the bar. And no word of a lie, I swear on Burnley Football Club, she walked up to me as she left, passed me a piece of paper and said:

‘I live in Bristol, but I come to London most weekends. If you ever want to go out for a drink give me a call’.

She handed me a piece of paper onto which she’d written her number and left.

We acted cool, but inside we were all jubilant. We’d just seen game work on a level we’d never seen before. We’d looked at our environment and adapted our game to meet the demands and challenges of the night, rather than just ploughing in with the standard format like amateurs and hoping for the best. We’d worked with what we had and got the result. It was my score but it was all our success. At this point we’d started to get good and we’d been working in set as a well drilled team unbelievably well. We knew our roles and we knew what each other was thinking. We were getting good but here we’d just got a girl to walk up to me and give me her number and we’d never even spoken to her.

And this is the power of these spoken DHVs. They’re the female equivalent of a man watching a strip tease. Understand that.

*I don’t like talking about fucking girls. ‘Dated’ or ’dating’ is my euphemism for ‘I am talking about a girl who I was fucking’.