Alright, so now for my thoughts/report on my stay in Montreal in July. It is really something that as I'm writing what I'm writing about, the badness that is the Montreal nightlife, Roosh’s lecture situation in the same city has gone nuclear. Haha, oh man. Rest assured however, that my analysis is not affected by these developments after the fact. I came to these conclusions two weeks ago.
Initially I had thought of making a separate thread for a full-fledged datasheet/journal. But because this is a negative report, I have chosen not to and have confined it to this thread of mine. And I do hope that my honesty and objectivity are appreciated here; I could write good news that people WANT to hear and soak in the accolades, but I am not a liar seeking
e-respect or
product sales.
First matter of discussion is me – who I am, how I operate, and what I look like. If you're of the school of thought that “Looks Don’t Matter” then feel free to skip the following portion. Otherwise, here goes.
Appearance: Below Average. I am 30 years old, though I can legit pass for younger. I am short at 5'7 ½". I weigh about 155 lbs. My background is Indian, though my complexion and features are quite light and truly such that I can pass as Middle Eastern, Hispanic, and occasionally Mediterranean. In online dating, this has no benefit whatsoever – ethnic is ethnic. In person, there is a slight benefit. My facial bone structure itself is probably above average that of an Indian male. I buzz my head. I guess I look like the rapper Pitbull, with a more trusting, less devilish face. Or Al Pacino without so much the long, bird-ish “hooknose” features. I’m fine to share pictures of what I look like over PM to any bona fide user who’s curious.
Occupation/Station: Above average. I am a lawyer. This means shit all in cold approach.
Game & Approach Skill: Above average. I’ve been doing nightgame on and off for a couple of years. I have 15 lays from it. About half are ONSs. I can approach a lot and have good conversation skills. I'm a good closer and can escalate aggressively once I identify a girl's interest. I LOVE nightgame when it works, and these lays came fast and easy early on (2012), but over the years the difficulty setting has ramped up to EXTREME for me. An explanation for this will be conveyed below. I was born and raised in Toronto so I talk like any normal person – no FOB/accent issues.
The purpose of my visit was to test the waters of Montreal nightlife, in the unanimously recommended St. Laurent district, in order to determine whether it lived up to the North American Poosy Paradise hype of earlier reports. If it was found to be a good and a reliable way to meet and date cute girls, better than my home of Toronto, then it would motivate a decision on my part to move to Montreal, to enroll in a course for French for some months at the least, and possibly to settle there to live and work long-term. I would also test out online game beforehand ("pipelining") and during.
I stayed in a "centrally located apartment" right on Boul. St. Laurent (St. Lawrence Blvd.) and Avenue des Pins (Pine Ave.) through the last 2 weeks of July. Major clubs like Muzique and Tokyo Bar were literally right across the street from me.
Now let me first start with the positives of Montreal from walking around during the day and going out at night. It's been said that Montreal women are the hottest North American has to offer. Is this true? I'd have to go with yes, but NOT because the girls here are genetically superior or anything like that. These are not Slavs or Scandinavians. The founding stock of Quebec is Western European (French) and so is more or less facially comparable to the rest of North America, which is British, Irish, German, etc.
Rather, the reason why Montreal girls appear decent is moreso because of functional/cultural factors in place. These are:
Thinness.
The thinness factor is real here. While these girls are not fitness model fit, fatties really stick out like a sore thumb, and so the women, of all stripes, keep their figures in check. This covers Anglo and Franco girls, and even the older women, 40+, don't blow up. Women are herd creatures and it seems that here the herd is still being led in a good direction. What's for sure is that Montreal (St. Laurent) is a bastion of thinness in the ever-fattening west. It's a peculiar sight to behold, harkening back to how the world must have been in 2005 or 1995. You just don't see the hambeast-ification of everywhere else.
Demographics.
There is less visible racial diversity here on the streets. So if you're all like, “Where tha white women at?”, yeah, there are more here. In Toronto, Asians and Indians constitute significant demographic blocs. In Montreal the main racial minority is blacks of Haitian descent, and then there’s a light sprinkling of Middle Easterners and Hispanics.
Diffusion/Organization.
In St. Laurent there are simply way more young people and young women walking about and living nearby. So it's a sort of illusory factor, based on the way Montreal is laid out. Contrast this with Toronto's stronger Corporate Downtown vs. Family Suburbs divide. So, so far, #’s 4, 7, and 13 from Roosh's infamous
Toronto article already do not apply to Montreal/St. Laurent.
The next positive is what I see of the male competition. In Montreal, the masculinity bar is definitely lower. Quebec men are shorter, skinnier, and less robust than Toronto guys. You won't see many handsome, built jock types on St. Laurent.
In Toronto I get heightmogged on the daily. In Montreal I felt only slightly below average. I don’t know if it’s something in the water or just genetics, but I’d see bands of 5’4” skinny fat guys walking around like it’s normal – it was astonishing. In Toronto, a “heightcel” who has to turn to PUA will be 5’8”. In Montreal he’d be 5’5”. Of the RSD guys I met, close to half of them were shorter than me. Like, when does that ever happen?
And, when I’d see a guy like that in good with a girl, I’d just laugh and wonder how he’d fare in AMOG factories like Citizen Nightclub, Underground Bar, and Grace O’Malleys in Toronto. I get amogged by the fucking barstools in there.
These positives however did not carry over to nightgame. In this,
my trip was a complete and utter disaster. It was astonishing just how horrible St. Laurent was for meeting girls. I mean, who would’ve thought that a city that’s been praised to high heaven, could be… so BAD?
St. Laurent, with its reputation as an endless strip of poppin' clubs providing an unparalleled nightlife experience, really… sucked. It's overrated and degraded. Toronto is begrudgingly superior in many respects.
In Toronto I complain about flaky numbers aka Kelloggs Corn Flakes, but at least I get those. In Montreal, I could barely get sets to even hook after 100-150 approaches. It was EPIC fail, with a lack of interest and availability across the board. The RSD guys I met of different shapes and sizes had spectacular blowout rates. This one guy, a tall burly Filipino, fearless and with a great mouth, was getting blown out left, right, and center. It was tragic and hilarious at the same time. I saw the few white RSD guys get a better reception here and there but those were but a few instances. Guys did get numbers and grinds every once in a while, but statistics/ROI-wise it was brutal.
These were the venues I checked out: Muzique, Tokyo Bar, Bar Korova, Up, Café Campus, TRH Bar, B Side, McKibbins, La Rockette.
Roosh's quintessential article,
"Is Night Game Really Dead in America?" described these places to a T. Read it with its list in the middle. The points are dead on and almost all of them applied. I can repeat particular ones that characterized the trip:
- Sausage fests everywhere.
- Girls rolling in consistently massive groups with layers of male friends, female friends, and their boyfriend/date for the night.
- Lack of thirst on the part of women due to full pipeline/saturation of options.
- Hardly a care for random cold approachers.
- Being judged and screened out almost immediately on approach.
And then there were issues unique to Montreal:
- Surprisingly underwhelming scale and turnout. The Great St. Laurent struggled to fill up like I'm used to in Toronto. A lot of these crowds were downright laughable for the prime nights of Friday/Saturday.
- Strong "Trap"-ification of the area. St. Laurent is supposed to be some kind of hipster/college district but the nightlife sure wasn't. Standard fare of generic, commercialized, "douchey" ethno-sausage fests with serious numerical scarcities of girls. Seems like the "typical Montreal girl" by and large avoids St. Laurent. So what am I even here for?
- "Street Game" is a closed door. In Toronto it's a difficult but nonetheless possible method. On St. Laurent it's hopeless. After 3:15 AM or so, when the clubs let out, it seems like girls vanish instantly… or there were barely any to begin with. Expect 10:1 ratios on the streets outside of the Pizza and Chow Mein places.
- Strong entrenched networks of RSD. I met up with one guy through their forum. (He was a great wing throughout and good dude – one of the few positives of the trip.) Then, through him, I met close to a dozen other young cold approachers who followed/knew of the company.
- No exotic factor. For travelling "Love Tourists" who bank on this, forget about it. This is not inner Quebec. This is an ultra cosmopolitan city and the girls here have seen it all. And the French language was not so much a barrier to me as were the general negative factors pertaining to nightgame written out above, i.e. market saturation.
Pipelining on OkCupid was also a total bust, same as it is for me in Toronto. 830 standard opening messages sent out. 250 recorded visitors to my profile. 30 responses. 12 second responses. 0 numbers. On Tinder I mashed the green heart furiously but barely got any matches.
To summarize what I saw during my time on St. Laurent, Montreal has certain factors that skew the overall dating market towards the favour of men. There is a thinness in the women that the rest of the continent is losing, and you have to bring less 'Alpha' to the table as a man. A Montreal man is likely happier than he would be anywhere else.
That said, nightgame is decidedly WORSE than the much maligned Toronto, and as the typical cold approacher you're gonna hit up against a really hard wall. While the Height threshold, Muscle threshold, Status threshold are lower here, there's NO indication that things such as the Face threshold and Race Threshold are too, and it's painfully clear that the all-important Familiarity threshold is much higher.
Now, women are not outright rude in either Toronto or Montreal – such reactions are rare in reality. But in Montreal girls are more cold, disinterested, occupied, judgmental, and plain scarce. In Toronto the nightlife is just bigger and fuller, even after its heyday of the mid 00s. Clubs and bars are more filled up and there are more people out. Why go to Muzique when you can go to Uniun or Tequila Jacks? Why go to Tokyo Bar when you can go to Drake or Cube? Why go to Bar Korova when you can go to Sneaky Dee's? Why go to McKibbins when you can go to Bar 244 or Gracies'? Why go to Up when you can go to EFS? And so on. Nightgame and cold approaching are by nature difficult, but if you have the goods (looks and confidence) to make it work and be a player, then Toronto is the better playground.
If you're a European I don’t recommend coming to Montreal for any pussy-related reason. Same if you're an American, don't bother – go to New York, or Vegas. There is only one class of individuals I would recommend Montreal to. It's been said that here social circle is king, and if you're a regular guy who just wants to make some friends and get a girlfriend, and if you're willing to settle in and learn French, then you'll get a better girl and likely much easier than you would elsewhere. Young men living in Anglo-Canada, who'd be happy with specifically this are to whom I recommend Montreal. It's a place I wish I had grown up in.
#’s 4, 7, 10, 13, 14, 15 from Roosh's
Toronto article more or less don’t apply in Montreal. Can't say that the rest don't though. As for Roosh's chances at picking up in Montreal now notwithstanding his newly acquired notoriety, I'd predict that they're actually good, for this reason: his superior looks. In Montreal he's a VERY good looking man. His 6'2" is like a 6'4" here. His height, robust frame, and masculine sasquatch hairiness put him in the top tier here in a way that he would not be in his native Washington DC.
This leaves my concluding thoughts on game, value, location, travel, and what the future holds for men. While the city does have some redeeming features, my experience in Montreal exploded the idea of it being a last remaining Poosy Paradise on this continent. Later on throughout this thread, many members chimed in to concur that Montreal's no walk in the park. As I said in an earlier update, it is my opinion that this notion is a coping mechanism for guys toughing it out in Anglo-America, hoping for an untouched oasis that is within reach where all their poosy hopes and poosy dreams can come true or some shit. Montreal is a cosmopolitan city in a prosperous liberal western nation, Canada. Yes, there’s the French language factor there, but otherwise what reason is there to believe that the city is all that different or unaffected by how it is, and what’s going on, in the rest of continent?
I operate now under the sober presumption now that all cities in the West are more less the same, follow the same rules and are subject to the same trends, and are becoming even more similar as time passes by.
You maximize your value (what you look like, what you do) and hit on girls in and around your league. Your league is determined by your hard physical and mental attributes such as face, height, build, style, age, race, occupation/status, presence/character. Attributes such as face, build, fashion, money, are flexible and can be somewhat “dated around” in certain “easier” settings and locations. The attributes of race, height, and age are strict dealbreakers and there is no place where they cease to matter significantly.
Value and league talk above all else and as such a man of low value and league will struggle wherever he goes, and conversely a man of high value and league will prosper wherever he goes. If you are having trouble with women then you need to face the question of your value at home rather seeking to run off to a magical place where it doesn't matter, which you will never find.
Social circles and social introductions are the primary avenue through which people form relationships. The best way for a regular guy to get into a relationship with an evenly matched woman is to make his way into social circle roughly matched to his race, age, and vocational group. His occupation/status and his presence/charisma are his leverage against his own looks for higher quality within.
On the flip side of the coin, there has been cold approach, a high volume, heavily front-loaded form of pussy acquisition. It is inherently difficult everywhere, is an r-selected mode of seduction (more looks and presence focused, with a view towards hookups and casual sex), with a natural handicap due to its irregularity. It offers the benefits of speed, quantity, variety, choice, and many people have started meaningful relationships from it regardless.
However, the spectre of social media is taking hold across the globe. It is demolishing whatever favourable regional differences and exploitable niches and market inefficiencies that existed and instituting a monolithic socio-sexual regime
everywhere.
It is offering women a staggering array of choice and endowing them with complete power in the sexual market
everywhere. It is cementing the 80/20 rule and streamlining a generic model of male attractiveness based on an entirely aesthetic ideal (tall, white, 8+ face, built, young, etc.) instantly available to ALL women for their Alpha Fukz,
everywhere. It is annihilating nightlife and the viability of real life cold approach
everywhere. And it is spelling Game Over for confident but aesthetically non-ideal cold approachers like me... and for us necessitating a reversion to social circle/familiarity-based forms of dating…
everywhere.
I hope all of this was hopeful. As you might infer from the last bit, I need to take a long, hard time off from the game to reflect and plan my next move.
![[Image: angel.gif]](https://rooshvforum.network/images/smilies/angel.gif)
