Hey guys, My friend shared this book with me so since the community has provided a wealth of knowledge Id like to share this ebook with you.
Defining Game
"You've got to be honest. If you can fake that you've got it made."
Sage and screen deity George Burns, when asked for his secret to success
The Age of Innocence and the Mysterious Ways of Game
Our starting point for defining game, and therefore for really understanding it, is a brief overview of its history and of previous attempts to define it. Originally, in the Mystery Method era (roughly 2001-2008), game generally signified a set of tactics used to begin an interaction with a girl, build a connection with her, and use it to guide her to the bedroom. It was in other words a set of techniques, the most ingenious or disingenuous of which could qualify as "tricks", and nothing more. This was the launching point of the carefully structured, highly theoretical approach to game in the modern era, but it's worth mentioning that the most noteworthy earlier approach, pioneered by Ross Jeffries in the late '90s, was loosely based on the then putative neurological field of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and also essentially boiled down to what would definitely qualify as a trick, since it consisted in practically hypnotizing the girl. NLP didn't really work of course, or if it did it worked, like all hypnotism, only on retards (since the power of suggestion is strongest precisely over the weakest-minded), but I am mentioning it here to highlight the essential similarity in the two theories, as in all theories that were being propounded then and would be for some time: they all consisted in essentially tricks, and all that really separated them was the type of trick used in each case.
In the Mystery Method this trick was, of course, the neg. The magic tricks and general puerile buffoonery were not meant to create attraction; that was supposed to have already been achieved via the neg long before the PUA had started properly interacting with the girl, and the only reason those silly tricks were brought in after that was because none of those nerds had a clue of how to talk to a girl and relate to her, or to any other human being who wasn't a nerd for that matter. Girls are like children anyway, as Schopenhauer has long noted in his essay On Women, and love stupid stuff like magic tricks if you know how to properly do them, so despite what all the latter "alpha" PUAs (all of whom are really gammas) will tell you, this stuff was a decent way for the nerds to help them stay in and prolong the interaction with the girls and relate to them, at least on that childish level. The nerds were not creating attraction in this way, as they themselves mistakenly thought—which is why they increasingly focused on the tricks and kept inventing new and more elaborate ones throughout the Mystery Method's heyday—but for a girl who was already attracted to the nerd for some other reason the tricks provided the excuse for the two lovebirds to keep talking for the few hours that it would require for them to feel sufficiently comfortable with each other to move their interaction forward, and to the next, physical level. This was a mutual requirement, by the way, and not solely the girl's, as many PUAs even today erroneously believe; for the nerd was no more comfortable invading the girl's personal space and laying his hands on her immediately than the girl was prepared to allow a complete stranger like him to. We were still many years away from GLL's stunning revelation that—as long as you were physically and mentally dominant enough (which the nerds of course weren't), and the girl sufficiently attracted and slutty—you could grab her by the collar and lead her to some dark corner within minutes—or in extreme cases even immediately, without even saying a word—and she would giddily consent to suck you off without even knowing your name (a type of game known today as "caveman game", which to make work however you have to be... a caveman). As for the real reason the girl would become attracted to the nerd, this could have been because the negging had worked, but, more usually—especially for bad neggers, which was the majority of them since negging is very hard to pull off successfully, requiring extreme levels of social intelligence and calibration which the typical nerd obviously lacked—it was because the girl would be lonely or sad or bored and the nerd would appear by sheer luck at the right time in the right place and would proceed to dispel her melancholy with his admittedly childish but certainly warm and in their own way cute attempts at making a connection, and hence attract her to him, at least for a little while. In GLL's terminology (which I'll be generally adopting because it's pretty fucking great), the girl was sexually available due to circumstances in her life completely unrelated to the nerd and his tricks and theories, and the nerd had passed the girl's attraction threshold, which could be inferred from the fact that a fat ugly troll of a nerd would never land a girl no matter how many magic tricks or witty openers—never mind negs—he learned, or how many girls he opened. Of course, since nerds are generally not very sexually attractive, and since a girl's attraction threshold correlates quite closely with her own attractiveness (at least up to a point, beyond which other forms of value can and often do replace it), except in rare circumstances in which it takes a temporary nosedive (if she has just been dumped, for example, or feels depressed for some reason, and so on), the girls the nerds would land tended to be mediocre fare; but for the previously celibate or even virginal nerds this was still a triumph, and the most attractive and hard-working among them (in terms of the volume of approaches they were willing to make—their capacity for playing what is now known as "the numbers game") did manage to land a genuine hottie from time to time thanks to a sheer confluence of helpful factors that would occasionally obtain; and though the nerds' understanding of the actual mechanics of how this entire business worked was hopelessly divorced from the reality, they still nevertheless managed to understand one thing—the most crucial thing even: that game worked. Tricks worked, and would get even a nerd laid if he tried hard enough and long enough; and once this realization had sunk in we were well on our way to a deeper understanding of the subject, and modern game had been irrevocably launched.
The Birth of Game out of the Spirit of Nerd Psychology
On that deeper level, meanwhile, which would take us many years to attain—only just now, in fact—the tricks weren't working on the girls so much as on the nerds themselves. They played the role of a kind of secret superpower armed with which the nerd would muster up the courage to venture forth from his room and face the wide cruel world, of dating and far more. Because without this power the nerd would have been too scared to even leave his room. An entire childhood and even adulthood of being rejected, ridiculed and marginalized by everyone around him had taught him to stay home and out of other people's way, and nothing short of magic would suffice to empower him enough to go out there and give society another shot. So the actual quality of Mystery's techniques didn't matter as much as the fact that his disciples believed in them enough to get out there and try them. In a way, the tougher the technique—and the neg was a formidable one—and therefore the more effort it took to master, the better, because it would mean getting into interactions with that many more girls, which would improve the real technique that really mattered—the nerd's socialization skills—in every nerd who wasn't clinically retarded, and even in many of those who were. Ideally, the technique would be bogus and impossible to make work, so that the nerd would have reason to keep approaching girls and groups of people forever, until the day he realized that you don't need tricks and specialized techniques to talk to people if you are not retarded: you just... go up to them and talk to them, just like everyone else.
But I am shortchanging the nerds here and being far too harsh on them because chatting up strangers without first having been socially introduced to them is not normal, even in our extremely liberal modern culture, and I wouldn't be surprised if there exist somewhere vestiges of other cultures in which it's even considered rude. (You certainly wouldn't have been advised to chat up random burqaed-up women in the erstwhile Islamic State, for example.) The reality still is that unless you have a very good reason to talk to a stranger—such as if they are a worker serving you in some capacity or other, or if you are a worker serving them; in which case the chat will tend to be confined to a professional level rather than a social one—you will be regarded as weird and your motives as suspicious more or less throughout the Western world; you will not, in other words, be received with anywhere near the openness and warmth with which someone who's coming with a proper social introduction and its implied assurances of trust will be. And that is the brute fact and and obstacle which indirect game was devised to deal with and overcome: instead of engaging the stranger directly on the social level—much less the sexual one, which is the actual goal—the player engages on another, far more acceptable level—such as the aforementioned professional one, for example, or the casual level if he decides like Roosh—the master of indirect game—to pose as someone who's lost and asking for directions—and then, as the interaction develops, he gradually shifts it to ever more personal levels, by small and relatively safe jumps, all the way to the bedroom.
All these techniques of course—which would eventually come to be collectively known as versions of the so-called "cold approach"—could quite plausibly be regarded as extremely deceptive, predatory, and even sociopathic, and in any case certainly as abnormal; so it makes sense that they would be devised by abnormal people to whom social norms didn't mean much and over whom they held little power; either because these people were too stupid and dysfunctional to grasp them (the garden variety nerd), or, in rare cases, because they were too intelligent and high-functioning and independent-minded to stoop to them and bother taking them into account (the geniuses like Mystery and GLL, and the more intelligent among the PUAs, all of whom are naturally introverted and thus to some degree sociopathic). Of course, the inventors of the theories and techniques would belong to the latter group, but the bulk of their adherents would hail from the former (and that's without counting the straight-up fraudsters that would start piling in once the field had become lucrative), and that's how a lot of mischief would be perpetrated, in terms of misinterpretations and exaggerated claims like the all-too common claim of the type that game could net a player any woman anywhere ever no matter the characters of the people involved and their circumstances.
So this was a pretty weird group of people overall, but whatever complaints one might have had against them individually, or as a group, what is undeniable is that without them—without us, because I should certainly be counted amongst their numbers—modern game would never have been developed because socially well-adjusted individuals would never had had enough motivation to invent it—not even those of them who were dissatisfied with their sex lives—because they would have been too uncomfortable stepping out of the norms of social acceptability to experiment sufficiently with the whole structure and thereby figure out exactly how it works, and thus how to best infiltrate it and subvert and dominate it.
But there I go, talking like a nerd too, an outcast from society, about "infiltrations" and "subversions" of "social structures", as if there's some kind of war going on. Yet, isn't the sexual game a kind of war, since the supply of hot girls in any given area is finite, and competition for them is fierce even between naturals? Viewed in this light, a certain degree of hostility towards other guys and perhaps even against girls (the "targets"), on top of the nerd's natural propensity to hostility against the entire social structure that insists on rejecting him, is certainly understandable, even if it is advisable to hide it well from others, and even, in some cases, from oneself. At any rate, the psychological games going on here are many and complex, and closely interrelated, and we've only begun to unravel them, even though we've already gone further in this direction than any PUA ever has or is even able to go. Suffice it to say that if you intend to dominate a field, a certain degree of hostility towards the incumbents is perfectly understandable and even desirable, so let's cut the nerds some slack and not be too harsh on them for it wherever we detect it. There's nothing wrong with being deceptive, predatory and even sociopathic if it's for a good cause; and hot girls are one of the best causes there have ever been.
The Sheer Coldness of Cold Approach
By the way, if I am making it sound as if the nerds invented cold approach, and as if no human had ever spoken to a stranger out of the blue for no apparent reason, that's not by any means my intention, since it's obviously a false idea; there'd hardly be a civilization if that had been the case; there'd hardly be a human species even. What I am saying is that it is a rare event, and thus an awkward one; and as a consequence no one is really good at it and able to use it to full effect. I can't even begin to count the chance encounters in my life with girls who straight-up opened me out of the blue, in the middle of the street in broad daylight even, in my days before pick-up, but which I wasted because I had no idea what to say and how to behave to move the interaction forward. When something like this happens to an untrained person—even to a natural like me—it's so unusual and feels so weird that, throughout the entire interaction, and even long afterwards, the mind is fully occupied with marveling at the fact that such a thing is happening/has happened at all, and there's simply no brainpower left to deal with the actual interaction, let alone to invent on the spot an effective method to guide it, physically and emotionally, from the middle of the street all the way to the bedroom. And if a guy feels this way—which is to say, too stunned to behave smoothly and properly and naturally—you can imagine how a girl will tend to feel in similar circumstances. That's why when you cold approach girls you should remain in the interaction as long as possible—especially if the girl seems to be reacting coldly or apathetically—provided she's not trying to run away from you or call the cops or something. That way you give her time to get over the stunned phase and her brain to catch up with what's happening and appreciate the opportunity that has just landed on her lap, so that she doesn't waste it—because her natural inclination will be to waste it. I have no doubt that a good percentage of the girls I open and get nowhere with are kicking themselves for weeks and months afterwards for not returning my interest, but by that time it's too late, especially if we didn't exchange contact details (which nets us another rule: always push for exchange of contact details, and in the last resort, if she insists on resisting, hand her a business card and walk away—which presupposes that you have a business card to hand her). The most extreme come-on I've ever experienced came from this older German woman in Tenerife a couple of years before I stumbled into game. This wasn't even a cold approach; it was a social encounter with proper introductions, and I still fucked it up. This woman—who must have been in her late-30s or early-40s, but very well-preserved and very sexy in her slutty way—was introduced to me by a friendly German couple who ran a restaurant and nearby bar that I used to patronize frequently in the seaside town of Puerto de la Cruz, where I lived for several years. Once a week or so, usually on the weekend, after they'd close up their bar at around 2AM, they'd gather together their regulars and head over to a bar or club that stayed open until much later, and occasionally they'd manage to drag me along with them too. On that particular night this German woman that I am speaking of came along, and for the entire time we were out she wouldn't leave me alone. She would put her arm around my waist and press herself onto me while our little group walked around the streets; she would chat with me constantly and pay me untold compliments; and she would completely ignore everyone else. All I had to do basically was say "Let's go home", and I would have had her (my place was merely a block away too...), but I was too stunned by her behavior to find the mental presence to do that. When I finally gathered my wits and decided to make a move... she was gone. I looked around the entire bar for her, but she had left without saying a word to anyone, not even to her friends who had invited her over. And, ironically, it was precisely her absence which had allowed me enough of a break from her absurd behavior to catch my breath and gather my wits about me, and decide to fire back at her in kind. But I had taken too fucking long and she had grown bored, or possibly disgusted by my apathy and unmasculine behavior, and she split without saying a word or giving me any way to reach her. I could have asked my friends for her number, but I was too ashamed of my interest in such an older woman. Sexy or not, she was too old for me, and therefore beneath me. Which hasn't stopped me from masturbating with her memory a number of times in the years since. And what have I not done with her in my imagination: I'll spare you the gory details, as it would make even some porn stars blush. Given that I am usually attracted to, and end up with, teenagers, many of whom have reservations about giving a simple blowjob, this woman threw a tremendous opportunity in my lap for some really nasty sex, but due to her lacking game (she hadn't given me a business card, after all), and my non-existent one, it didn't happen. Nor was I a sexually inexperienced youth at the time; this wasn't Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft in The Graduate—I was a 34-year-old man who'd had over 30 sexual partners and over a dozen long-term relationships with girls from three continents and two dozen countries over a period of nearly 20 years. But this stuff just doesn't happen every day; to most people it never happens; so when it does you're not ready for it and are therefore prone to screw it up. Long-time PUAs, and especially the successful ones, inhabit an entirely different mental universe than the normal folk they interact and try to sleep with, so they no longer realize how weird their behavior appears from the viewpoint of anyone who's not a PUA, and therefore fail to make enough allowances for them, just like the German lady who almost raped me failed to do with me. With a little less aggression and a little more patience, plus the sense to exchange contact details with me if I was still nevertheless failing to respond properly to her advances, she would have had me, and doubtless many other guys she must have flabbergasted over the years with her female version of caveman game.
A somewhat less extreme come-on that I've experienced—which however occasioned an equally colossal failure on my part to properly capitalize on it—occurred again in Tenerife, in the same town, barely a block away from the area where the business with the German woman would take place a couple years later. It was past midnight and I was sitting with my laptop on the steps of a small bar—owned by a German acquaintance of mine again (they are everywhere in Tenerife)—working on Insomnia via the bar's Wi-Fi connection. I used to do that a lot in those days because I hadn't set up a connection at home yet, and to ensure a productive session, free of noise and distractions, I'd usually go very late, after the bar or restaurant in question had closed. So there I was, tapping away on my laptop on the steps of this shuttered bar in the middle of the deserted street at one or two in the morning, lost in the contents of my screen and utterly oblivious of my surroundings, since there wasn't a soul, or even a stray cat or dog to attract my attention, when I suddenly became aware of three young people ambling slowly past me in the street in front of me, barely six feet away: a couple walking arm in arm, frequently kissing and being generally all over each other, and a lone girl who was walking alongside them. They were obviously returning home from a night out and were clearly in high spirits and probably inebriated—or at least the couple were, for the lone girl was quiet—but far from any kind of state that I would classify as drunk. So I quickly sized them up with a look, since they were passing so closely by me they had in effect forced themselves on my attention, and then returned my gaze to my laptop's brightly glowing LCD and instantly forgot about them. But the little group had noticed me, and the girl in the couple disengaged from her boyfriend long enough to take a step in my direction and say something to me in Spanish, to which I responded with my usual line that "I don't speak Spanish". "She needs a boyfriend", the girl barked at me, nodding in the general direction of her lone friend, and I was so taken aback by this insanely awkward personal revelation, coming as it did at two in the morning from total strangers, that all I could come up with for a response was something absurdly lame like (because I don't remember exactly what I said), "I am sorry, but I am busy", or, even worse, "No thanks"—the kind of responses, by the way, that daygamers—even attractive, experienced ones—are all too familiar with. So the group kept walking—since the girl had fired her words at me en passant (they'd slowed down, but never actually stopped)—and I spent the rest of the night trying to forget what a great opportunity I'd wasted by focusing on my work. At the time, by the way, I hadn't had sex—or any close contact with an attractive girl—for months, and it had been years since I'd had a real relationship, and you better believe I was hungry for both. Nor am I some lame dude who freezes up and doesn't know how to talk to people; I've already enumerated the vast sexual and relationship experience I had accumulated up to the point (vast by normal person standards, at least; not by those of PUAs who do nothing else in their lives for decades than chase skirts)—without game even, nota bene—which I obviously never would have if I were lame. I am in fact a brilliant conversationalist, but such weird circumstances would have stumped anyone, at least for the first few seconds of the interaction, during which you must be quick on your feet to respond as if the whole business is quite ordinary, otherwise the window of opportunity will close and all the wit and sociability in the world will be useless, even if you do possess them. This is in fact a common refrain among beginner players, many of whom profess to be good at chatting and quite comfortable once the interaction has got going, but awkward and even fearful of it before it has started, and right at the beginning. But that's precisely game—overcoming approach anxiety is 90% of game—or the anxiety of being approached, in the little story of mine that I just related. To give you an idea of how anxiously I had acted then, consider that, after the girl had told me in English about her friend's desire for a boyfriend, I hadn't even mustered the courage to look directly at the girl I was being offered. I deliberately avoided so much as even glancing at her, delivered my stiff reply, and stuck my face back in my screen. You would expect the natural reaction to someone's being offered something to be at least to look at what he was being offered, but in the near-instantaneous deliberations and mental calculations that took place in my brain between the offer and my reply, I felt that taking the offer seriously and looking would have made me seem hungry and thus unattractive, so I went with my instinct—my natural's instinct—and feigned indifference. And this is a good instinct too and all naturals know it and listen to it, because in the kinds of social situations in which naturals thrive, it works wonders. But a real player has to often—and indeed, as I'll be showing later on, he has to usually—work in unnatural and anti-social circumstances, and he has to become comfortable enough with them to make them seem perfectly natural and social, and not be stumped by the kind of tragicomically bad game that girls tend to employ in the rare cases when they can be bothered to actively pursue guys, as in the two examples from my life that I just gave. The girl in my second example was indeed attractive, by the way; I know because I had sized her up in the first look I gave the group when I had heard them approaching. But it was a hasty look so I hadn't formed a clear idea of her in my mind; I registered both girls as "vaguely attractive", but they weren't actual prospects, and I was indeed busy with my work, so I didn't care. Once one of them had become a prospect, I cared, but the unexpectedness of the situation and the speed at which it played out meant that instinct would govern my behavior, and the only instinct I had at the time was the natural's one of feigned indifference. Today, after several years of pick-up theory and practice, I have several other instincts to choose from, depending on the circumstances—and far quicker reflexes to evaluate what's happening and choose between them—and my dominant instinct today in random cold approach scenarios—regardless of who made the approach—is to be friendly and affable and help all participants including myself relax by making simple polite conversation. And that's what I would have done today if faced with a similar situation: I would have first of all looked squarely at the girl I was being offered and smiled at her to dispel the awkwardness, then introduced myself and asked her name, disregarding completely her friend's awkward comment, since I know that this is what she would have wanted. And then I would have proceeded to chat with all three of them about how their night was going, the nightlife in Tenerife in general, their personal situations and mine, and so on. And after a few minutes of this I would have made an excuse, due to being busy with my work, and taken the girl's number, as I've done hundreds of times in various day and night scenarios since. And it's these hundreds of similar experiences that enable me today to act, and indeed to be, natural in a situation that is essentially entirely unnatural to the kind of creatures we are and have been raised to be, and the norms of the society we live in.
My point with these two stories is twofold. Firstly, I want to help you see pick-up from the girl's perspective—which was my own in these examples since I was the one being hit on—and understand that you should never say, "Well, if she had wanted something to happen she would have said or done something". It's quite possible, and probably quite common, for her to want something to happen but to freeze in the moment and not know how to act to facilitate that. I once spent no less than three evenings hanging out with two German girls, one hot and a mediocre one, and by the third night was convinced that the hot one had no interest in me—indeed I strongly suspected that she positively disliked me—and so made out with her friend, who proceeded to tell me, in the rush of honest confessions that often accompany the first make out, that both of them thought I was "super hot" and had been salivating over me since the moment they had met me. Talk about a facepalm! And then I had to sit there and watch the hot one being picked up by an ugly South American dude who was exploiting her momentary vulnerability—occasioned by her friend making out with me and her acquiring "third wheel" status in our little group—to get his grubby hands on her, without being able to say or do anything. But it was a valuable experience because it taught me to always go straight for the girl I really want without paying too much attention to girls' behavior—especially in the initial stages of getting to know each other, when people are prone to acting weird because they don't feel comfortable interacting with strangers. The hot German girl probably thought she was being cool and desirable by acting aloof towards me... and ended up with the ugly South American dude for her trouble. More generally then, since girls' initial reactions to an approach can't be trusted as a guide on deciding how to proceed, advanced game consists in making a solid, dignified approach, and then withdrawing while leaving behind some way for her to get in touch with you if she decides at some point in the future. If she does, the cat's pretty much in the bag if you know what you're doing—and quite possibly even if you don't; if she doesn't, the situation is far from hopeless, but great care must be taken when reinitiating contact to figure out if it's shyness that's keeping her away, in which case calm and relaxed persistence will typically win you the game; or sexual unavailability, in which case you need to back off asap almost completely and either write her off for good, or lightly ping her once every few months to check if her status has changed: all of which has been covered very capably by various PUAs (from whom I learned it in the first place), which is why we won't be getting into it here.
And secondly, and most importantly, I related these two experiences of mine and extensively analyzed them to drive home the rarity, and thus the weirdness, and thus the unnaturalness—the almost anti-naturalness—of cold approach; which, properly understood (as you will be made to understand by the time this book if over), is essentially game, is pick-up. How do we make this strange, unnatural type of interaction seem, and therefore ultimately be, as comfortable and natural as possible, while conducting ourselves as attractively as we can throughout it in the process? This is what 90% of game is all about once you've stripped away—as we'll be doing shortly—all the other concerns and activities that have grown up around it in the years since its invention. I repeat that the PUAs didn't invent cold approach, but they did study it extensively and turned it into a science; which meant that it suddenly turned from a talent into a skill that could be studied and practiced and mastered and perfected. And that's how the nerds, the unnaturals, became what Tom Torero calls "supernaturals", i.e. better than naturals; while the naturals themselves, like me and a few other guys who took the trouble to study this stuff and learn to apply it—despite our already by normal standards successful sex and love lives—became real-life James Bond-like characters (for training can overcome talent only when that talent is untrained; trained talent is unbeatable, is the ultimate, as every teacher in every field knows). Precisely how the nerds became PUAs we've already seen and analyzed in great detail, so let's turn our attention now to understanding and analyzing how the PUAs became naturals, and finally supernaturals and regular Casanovas.
What's in a Game?
It helped a great deal that they dubbed what they were doing with the label "game". Men—and especially young, weak and sexually-inexperienced men—take very seriously women's opinion of them, and a few harsh rejections are all it takes to make them question their own masculinity and value, and swear off the possibility of a sexual dimension to their lives forever. So viewing the whole thing as a game—a role-playing game, ideally, with its focus on conscious acting of various roles being especially helpful here (Mystery and some of this friends were reportedly heavy into D&D)—helped them downplay the seriousness of the whole business and disengage, to a degree, their egos from their results. And this disengagement was essential, was paramount, because without it the prospective player would have no chance of overcoming his approach anxiety, which, while it persisted, would not even allow him to properly play the game. If, on the other hand, he somehow overcame it, success—or at least some measure of it—was inevitable, since as long as you are not clinically retarded or horribly disfigured or something, you are bound to hit on a girl that will be attracted to you sooner or later, if you hit on enough girls. "You don't even need game", wrote Roosh in one of his numerous inspirational blog posts (in the old days of his blog while he still was more inspirational than whiny) in an effort to convince his readers to never lay their arms down and keep approaching all night long like machines, if they wanted to have more successful nights out in their lives than failed ones. This was also the insight that would be later brilliantly expressed in GLL's "Nervous Guy Game", where the beginning player would approach girls, not trying to hide his nervousness, as all other PUAs were advocating, but embracing it, accepting it and harnessing it and flatly confessing it to the girl, and without any tricks and stratagems whatsoever revealing his interest in her and asking for her number. "I don't usually do this so I am feeling rather nervous, but I saw you and thought you looked cute and decided to come over and introduce myself and ask for your number", whereby all nervous behaviors and subcommunications on the part of the player went from being liabilities to truthful evidence that reinforced his approach. Ironically, in the demonstration video that GLL shot to showcase this type of approach, many girls weren't buying his story because he didn't seem at all nervous, but that's precisely the point at which the beginner would arrive if he practiced this type of approach long enough: he'd eventually get used to it and stop being nervous, at which point, like bicycle training wheels, he could shed it and move on to normal game, with the nervousness engendered by approach anxiety having been largely overcome.
What all these mindsets and experiments at length revealed to those, like GLL, who were paying attention, was that even the worst, stupidest game—which Nergous Guy Game was certainly close to being—could work if you tried them long enough, while conversely, the best game in the world would sometimes—and indeed most often—fail. Game, therefore, could not be the only factor that determined success and failure, and perhaps it wasn't even the most important one. Other factors had to play a part and influence the interactions and their results, but in order for the player to stay in the game long enough to discover them he had to grow a thick skin and learn how to deal with, and take in stride, rejection. It is roughly at that point that so-called "inner game" appeared on the scene, which, seen aright, was not so much concerned with how to achieve success, but more with how to manage failure. And, as aforesaid, the whole "it's only a game" angle which the PUAs' very terminology created and encouraged, helped tremendously in this respect, as did all related concepts such as success ratios, notches, flags and all types of stats. The hundred girls who rejected you last week were not real people, under this interpretation of what the nerds were doing, but mere data points in an ongoing experiment, and the entire activity wasn't real but merely a game, because if it were real it would be scary and the nerd would never have left his room to pursue it.
Reality Sets in and the Turn to Self-improvement
The nerds did leave their rooms, however, and therefore inevitably met with some level of success. And since, as everyone knows, success breeds success, that's exactly what was about to happen here, the first step of which was for the nerds—or at least for some of them, the most successful ones—to... raise their standards. We're talking about mostly middle-aged guys who needed textbooks and spreadsheets to get laid, remember, so "success" for them was losing their virginity to 5s and 6s, and at most to the occasional lonely and depressed and horny 7. But once some of them had got to the level of being able to attract such girls with a fair regularity, they were bound to get comfortable at that level and therefore grow sated and bored with it, and cast about for the next level and its higher level of challenge... and rewards. Those rewards were the 8s and 9s and 10s that strutted their stuff in all the night venues in which games was originally developed (daygame was a much later development, that was invented at least half a decade after Mystery Method) and the nerds now began to seriously deliberate on the seriously challenging task of figuring out how to get them.
And the first step in that direction was to observe what kind of guys were already getting them, and then simply try to emulate (or dissimulate, as the case may have been) their attributes and behavior. Celebrities and the wealthy were quickly ruled out as too difficult to emulate, and rapists and kidnappers were never even considered (the nerd's mind never going as far as to regard crime as a possibility, or even a reality beyond books and movies), so what was left after all these alternatives were taken out of the equation were the so-called "bad boys", or, as they would come to be known in PUA terminology in order to borrow some terms from established academic disciplines such as animal ethology and lend the nerds' shady and often bogus theories a veneer of respectability, the so-called "alpha males". Whether the type of leather-jacket-wearing tattoo-covered stoner retards that most girls regard as "bad boys" were really the alpha males of the homo sapiens species (which translates to "man the wise" nota bene) was a detail that didn't appear to bother the nerds very much—indeed none of them seem to have even considered it—; but the dudes were certainly getting laid like rock stars without being rich or famous or in any way accomplished or even good-looking, and so, since eerily enough, the nerds also happened to lack these qualities, these "bad boys" quickly became the model, the ideal of masculinity, that the nerds set for themselves to emulate. "We have to become alpha males!" is the cry that began reverberating sometime around 2008 or so from all the cutting-edge PUA blogs, and above all from the PUA's formerly known as Roissy (now Heartiste). And since hot girls seemed to prefer these "bad boys" over all other types of boys, and since hot girls were, as every nerd knew, the highest authorities on human worth in the land, it followed that "bad boys" were the most valuable human beings to have ever walked the earth, otherwise hot girls wouldn't prefer them. And since the nerds were the most repulsive type of person as far as hot girls were concerned, they surely were the least valuable human beings, and had to find a way to improve themselves, to self-improve, if they ever wanted to lay them. This entire abysmally wretched line of reasoning followed automatically, inevitably like fate, once the nerds had (unconsciously, of course) decided to fully internalize feminine values in order to discover what hot girls wanted, and give it to them. And once Nick Krauser had arrived on the scene and taken this logic and run with it, fully schematizing human society—or the entire universe even—with hot girls at the top, leather-jacket-wearing "alpha" "bad boys" (or "sigma" "bad boys", in the rare moments of clarity when Krauser managed to realize that he was completely alone and no real human being gave a shit about him) right below them, and finally an endless rabble of contemptible "beta", "gamma" and "omega" "chodes" who were completely worthless since, after all, all they had ever accomplished was to take mankind out of its caves and build all of human civilization while the "alpha" "bad boys" (or "sigma" "bad boys"—Krauser never seemed to make up his mind on this distinction) were poking holes into their jeans and choosing leather jackets and tattoo designs, PUA theory had finally managed to perfectly recreate the feminine worldview—the typical 21st century female's conception of how the world works—and the PUAs, by studying it and practicing it and fully internalizing it, had finally become women.
Self-improvement vs. Game
From nerd to woman might seem like a large trip to make, but it isn't really, since effeminacy is precisely one of the key characteristics of nerdhood. All the nerds had to do, therefore, in order to understand women, was to abandon themselves completely to the considerable feminine dimensions of their personalities, and empathy would take care of the rest. After all, wasn't there a significant homoerotic dimension in the nerds' admiration of leather-jacket-wearing and tattoo-sporting "alpha" "bad boys"? Wasn't the breathless, gushing manner in which the nerds related and analyzed the "bad boys'" exploits in innumerable blog and forum posts and badly-written ebooks recognizably homoerotic in nature, since homosexuals are the only other type of person who respects and is attracted to "bad boys" besides women? ("We all want them", wrote Milo Yiannopoulos at some point.) Because of course real men had always viewed such characters with barely disguised contempt; go to every living statesman, military man, bussinesman, craftsman, or man of sciences and letters, and contemplate the opinions and values of all dead ones too, and if you find a single one who respects or ever respected "bad boys" call up the Guinness World Records because you've found something truly extraordinary that they'll be interested in. The only types of people who have ever respected such characters are women, homosexuals... and now PUAs; while all the rest of us know full well that there are teenagers who could beat the everliving snot out of "bad boy" icons such as James Dean. "Rebel without a cause", meanwhile, when properly understood, means "retard"; so if these people are neither physically strong, nor mentally, all they need is a wig and they might as well be women (look at a picture of Krauser with this idea in mind and I dare you to come back here and tell me I'm wrong). And it's worth pointing out that GLL—the only major PUA who can conveivably claim "alpha" or "sigma" status for himself without sending the rest of the planet's population in hysterics—never even once uses terms such as "alpha male" or "bad boy" in his entire website. He uses the far more accurate term "swag factor" to signify the same concept, meaning that vague aura of "coolness" that women find so attractive. He doesn't call it coolness, however, because he unconsciously realizes that real coolness and what women deem cool are not the same thing. Real coolness, after all, was Nikola Tesla creating lightning to order, but Tesla never had groupies, and hot girls don't even know about him. So girls' conception of coolness is a very different thing from the genuine kind (in some ways, almost its opposite), which is why GLL opted for the silly-sounding "swag factor" term, which brilliantly captures girls' inherently silly understanding of coolness. I am 100% certain that GLL didn't consciously pick this term due to the reason I just gave, by the way, but since he is, after all, the only major PUA who's not a nerd, and since he is therefore repulsed by the nerds' effeminate worldview and wants to steer as well clear of it as he can, he built his own terminology from scratch, and under the circumstances it shouldn't be surprising to find that it is immeasurably superior to the PUAs'.
But the showdown between the nerds versus GLL (or GLL vs. Krauser, since Krauser would at length be proclaimed the dominant nerd) would take some time to unfold. In 2008-2010, meanwhile, while self-improvement hysteria was gripping the PUA world, neither of them had quite entered the scene yet; Krauser's marriage was still limping along, while GLL was busy experimenting and studying under various PUAs. And here is where we at last arrive, for the first time, on the issue of the definition of game. Because a growing number of voices were starting to be heard across the PUA world proclaiming that self-improvement was all that mattered, and that all tricks and strategies—pick-up lines, openers, takeaways; even the sacred neg—were useless. The concept of "value" became the dominant concept, which, for women—the theory went—is essentially identical with physical beauty, while for men it is comprised of a number of factors, including looks, health, wealth, education, profession, social standing, etc. All a PUA had to do, according to this theory, in order to attract a girl, was to raise his value above hers—as far above as he could raise it—and "hypergamy" would take care of the rest. Hypergamy, of course—women's alleged desire to land a man whose value exceeded theirs—was kind of a bogus concept, or at least a superfluous one. It was borrowed from anthropology, where the concept "value" was meant in a strict social-status sense, and where therefore the idea of hypergamy is useful and makes sense, it being demonstrably true that for most of recorded history most men would gladly marry women below their social standing, as long as these women were sufficiently attractive, whereas for women the man's social standing mattered more and they would therefore generally aim for the highest status man they could reasonably hope to attain. But that was before sexual liberation, universal suffrage and "equality", and certainly well before the PUAs; that's why gigolos are possible today, and poor good-looking guys can easily marry into wealthy families, something which would have been nigh-inconceivable a mere couple of centuries ago. And anyway, as aforesaid, the anthropological concept of feminine value (=social standing) is not the same with the PUAs' (=physical beauty, or in the man's case, in modern society, "swag factor"), so hypergamy doesn't mean the same thing in the two disciplines. The anthropologists' version is sound but outdated, while the PUAs'... means what exactly? That people want to attract the best sexual partners that they can according to each person's individualy criteria? Then men are "hypergamous" too because they'd all dump their girlfriends and wives in an instant if Kate Upton called them up to ask them out, just as women would dump their boyfriends and husbands if Brad Pitt came calling. The truth was that for the nerdy, resentful PUAs "hypergamy" signified all the times they had been dumped by their girlfriends for better guys, and since they themselves had never dumped anyone, they naturally concluded that "hypergamy"=dumping was a uniquely feminine quality and therefore one on which the nerds' long pent-up resentment could be directed and unleashed. And that's how hypergamy came to join feminism as unholy scarecrow and scapegoat across the PUA world, with innumerable blog and forum posts being scribbled against it on a daily basis as a kind of exorcism ritual, until at last the poor anthropologists' term had been debased to such an extent that Krauser could walk into a Russian club in 2014, observe girls checking out guys despite being in the company of their boyfriends, and denounce this perfectly natural behavior as "hypergamy in action"—in which case men, who demonstrably do approximately a billion times more checking out than even the sluttiest of women, would be about a billion times more "hypergamous" than them. But Krauser didn't like the sound of this fact when I pointed it out to him in his blog post, so he shut his stupid face up and proceeded to lock the comments... (GLL meanwhile, as far as I am aware, has never once touched the concept, what with him being too "hypergamous" himself—far more "hypergamous" than any girl he's ever banged and dumped—to have the time for it).
"Hypergamy" aside, however, it was clear that the PUAs' value-theory and the associated self-improvement creed were basically sound, so the number one contentious issue on cutting-edge PUA blogs towards the end of the decade became precisely how, and in what ways, the PUAs were to improve themselves. And though the stupid "bad boy" ideal was generally dominant, there were still plenty of reasonable voices that advocated a kind of renaissance ideal, entreating the nerds to engage in sports, travel, study and the arts and so on—even in dancing and cooking—in order to become deeper and more multifaceted, more well-rounded men, and thus more interesting and attractive to women; with the ideal type this time being, not a James Dean-type character, but The Most Interesting Man In The World (TMIMITW) as seen in Dos Equis beer commercials.
It was clear by now in what way PUA theory had evolved since Mystery's day. Because Mystery too had been saying that women's attraction triggers were many and varied, and included looks, wealth, social standing and so on; the difference, however, was that Mystery advocated the creation of stories—fake stories—through which the player's prowess in all these categories could be demonstrated to his targets, whereas the new PUAs were telling their students to really become competent in all these categories, and then they wouldn't have to make up stories: they could just tell the truth and women would become naturally attracted to them. "Bad boys" aside, therefore, the two schools of thought largely agreed on what women wanted, and only differed on how players could give it to them: with the new school advocating self-improvement, while the old school championed deception. In addition, recognizing that self-improvement was a long-term goal and that people couldn't be reasonably expected to swear completely off sexual and romantic relationships until they had attained it, the new school advocated a halfway stage dubbed "fake it till you make it" in which players would employ deception to a limited extent—as limited as possible—while working towards their self-improvement goals and gradually phasing out deception as they attained them. At any rate the new school was generally convinced that genuine value trumped deception any day of the week, and thus it was value, and value alone, that should be the master player's ultimate goal. But what all this implied was that there's no such thing as "game", since if ultimate game is self-improvement, the concept of "game" was superfluous since there already existed a wealth of self-improvement authors and literature that utterly trumped anything the PUAs had ever scribbled on the subject, thus implying that PUA literature had been rubbish all along and amounted to little more than a misunderstanding.
Was "game" indeed a superfluous concept and PUA theory a misunderstanding? Countless ebook chapters and blog and forum posts would be furiously scribbled to fiercely argue this point, and very few PUAs would ever be able to make up their minds on it one way or another, and offer a coherent answer; but for two people, at least, the answer was obvious. On the one corner stood GLL who, as the most extreme representative of the self-improvement philosophy—who in his relentless, obsessive quest for it had turned himself into a kind of guinea pig for all types of dubious self-improvement techniques—from steroid-enhanced body-building to anxiolytic drugs and penile enlargement methods—had no respect for game and its gurus, whom he would again and again ridicule as "PUA wizards", and had developed a type of ultra-minimalist "game" that essentially amounted to looking as good as possible and then going up to the girl and saying "what's up"; while, on the other corner, stood Krauser, the most respected of the nerdy "bad boy" PUAs, for whom game did not merely exist but was a towering theoretical discipline deserving of university chairs and thick academic textbooks and constant research (are you seeing the gamma yet?) and who denigrated the idea that anything GLL did could be described as "game". Self-improvement, for Krauser, was certainly useful (although he himself didn't actually practice it, nota bene), but game was something far above and beyond that. Good-looking guy game was therefore not game at all and, as Roosh would later sarcastically quip while summarizing Krauser's views in the thread in which he banned him from his forum, "If you have more than ten hairs on your head you're not spitting true game". What Krauser seemed to be saying, amazingly, was that ugliness (or, more generally, low value) was a prerequisite for "true game"—or at least for Krauser's version of it—but no one seemed smart enough to grasp this, least of all Krauser himself, and it would be some time before even I would see the truth in it and fully understand what it meant, and what it implied. For the moment, at any rate, the PUA world had reached a stalemate, and both sides gave up the debate and barricaded themselves in their respective blogs and forums to hone and refine their respective theories and techniques—without, however, ever touching on the problem again. Because the problem had simply become too complex for regular guys like the PUAs to solve, with their average intelligences and average educations and average experiences, so just as the "Can games be art?" debate had ground to a halt half a decade earlier in the videogame world, and the participants had given up on ever attaining a consensus—or even anything approaching a coherent answer—thereafter nipping all new attempts at a discussion in the bud as pointless or, even worse, as "trolling"; so too occurred in the PUA world once it had reached the depth and sophistication beyond which it is impossible to go without recourse to rigorous definitions and first principles. The problem, in other words, had become at last philosophical—it had attained, that is to say, the kind of complexity which only genius can deal with; and so the specialists in the discipline finally shut up—and in their colorful and highly amusing way shut each other up—until a genius had been found who would take an interest in the problem and come around and neatly solve it for them. And that's where I entered the picture.
Defining Game
"You've got to be honest. If you can fake that you've got it made."
Sage and screen deity George Burns, when asked for his secret to success
The Age of Innocence and the Mysterious Ways of Game
Our starting point for defining game, and therefore for really understanding it, is a brief overview of its history and of previous attempts to define it. Originally, in the Mystery Method era (roughly 2001-2008), game generally signified a set of tactics used to begin an interaction with a girl, build a connection with her, and use it to guide her to the bedroom. It was in other words a set of techniques, the most ingenious or disingenuous of which could qualify as "tricks", and nothing more. This was the launching point of the carefully structured, highly theoretical approach to game in the modern era, but it's worth mentioning that the most noteworthy earlier approach, pioneered by Ross Jeffries in the late '90s, was loosely based on the then putative neurological field of neurolinguistic programming (NLP) and also essentially boiled down to what would definitely qualify as a trick, since it consisted in practically hypnotizing the girl. NLP didn't really work of course, or if it did it worked, like all hypnotism, only on retards (since the power of suggestion is strongest precisely over the weakest-minded), but I am mentioning it here to highlight the essential similarity in the two theories, as in all theories that were being propounded then and would be for some time: they all consisted in essentially tricks, and all that really separated them was the type of trick used in each case.
In the Mystery Method this trick was, of course, the neg. The magic tricks and general puerile buffoonery were not meant to create attraction; that was supposed to have already been achieved via the neg long before the PUA had started properly interacting with the girl, and the only reason those silly tricks were brought in after that was because none of those nerds had a clue of how to talk to a girl and relate to her, or to any other human being who wasn't a nerd for that matter. Girls are like children anyway, as Schopenhauer has long noted in his essay On Women, and love stupid stuff like magic tricks if you know how to properly do them, so despite what all the latter "alpha" PUAs (all of whom are really gammas) will tell you, this stuff was a decent way for the nerds to help them stay in and prolong the interaction with the girls and relate to them, at least on that childish level. The nerds were not creating attraction in this way, as they themselves mistakenly thought—which is why they increasingly focused on the tricks and kept inventing new and more elaborate ones throughout the Mystery Method's heyday—but for a girl who was already attracted to the nerd for some other reason the tricks provided the excuse for the two lovebirds to keep talking for the few hours that it would require for them to feel sufficiently comfortable with each other to move their interaction forward, and to the next, physical level. This was a mutual requirement, by the way, and not solely the girl's, as many PUAs even today erroneously believe; for the nerd was no more comfortable invading the girl's personal space and laying his hands on her immediately than the girl was prepared to allow a complete stranger like him to. We were still many years away from GLL's stunning revelation that—as long as you were physically and mentally dominant enough (which the nerds of course weren't), and the girl sufficiently attracted and slutty—you could grab her by the collar and lead her to some dark corner within minutes—or in extreme cases even immediately, without even saying a word—and she would giddily consent to suck you off without even knowing your name (a type of game known today as "caveman game", which to make work however you have to be... a caveman). As for the real reason the girl would become attracted to the nerd, this could have been because the negging had worked, but, more usually—especially for bad neggers, which was the majority of them since negging is very hard to pull off successfully, requiring extreme levels of social intelligence and calibration which the typical nerd obviously lacked—it was because the girl would be lonely or sad or bored and the nerd would appear by sheer luck at the right time in the right place and would proceed to dispel her melancholy with his admittedly childish but certainly warm and in their own way cute attempts at making a connection, and hence attract her to him, at least for a little while. In GLL's terminology (which I'll be generally adopting because it's pretty fucking great), the girl was sexually available due to circumstances in her life completely unrelated to the nerd and his tricks and theories, and the nerd had passed the girl's attraction threshold, which could be inferred from the fact that a fat ugly troll of a nerd would never land a girl no matter how many magic tricks or witty openers—never mind negs—he learned, or how many girls he opened. Of course, since nerds are generally not very sexually attractive, and since a girl's attraction threshold correlates quite closely with her own attractiveness (at least up to a point, beyond which other forms of value can and often do replace it), except in rare circumstances in which it takes a temporary nosedive (if she has just been dumped, for example, or feels depressed for some reason, and so on), the girls the nerds would land tended to be mediocre fare; but for the previously celibate or even virginal nerds this was still a triumph, and the most attractive and hard-working among them (in terms of the volume of approaches they were willing to make—their capacity for playing what is now known as "the numbers game") did manage to land a genuine hottie from time to time thanks to a sheer confluence of helpful factors that would occasionally obtain; and though the nerds' understanding of the actual mechanics of how this entire business worked was hopelessly divorced from the reality, they still nevertheless managed to understand one thing—the most crucial thing even: that game worked. Tricks worked, and would get even a nerd laid if he tried hard enough and long enough; and once this realization had sunk in we were well on our way to a deeper understanding of the subject, and modern game had been irrevocably launched.
The Birth of Game out of the Spirit of Nerd Psychology
On that deeper level, meanwhile, which would take us many years to attain—only just now, in fact—the tricks weren't working on the girls so much as on the nerds themselves. They played the role of a kind of secret superpower armed with which the nerd would muster up the courage to venture forth from his room and face the wide cruel world, of dating and far more. Because without this power the nerd would have been too scared to even leave his room. An entire childhood and even adulthood of being rejected, ridiculed and marginalized by everyone around him had taught him to stay home and out of other people's way, and nothing short of magic would suffice to empower him enough to go out there and give society another shot. So the actual quality of Mystery's techniques didn't matter as much as the fact that his disciples believed in them enough to get out there and try them. In a way, the tougher the technique—and the neg was a formidable one—and therefore the more effort it took to master, the better, because it would mean getting into interactions with that many more girls, which would improve the real technique that really mattered—the nerd's socialization skills—in every nerd who wasn't clinically retarded, and even in many of those who were. Ideally, the technique would be bogus and impossible to make work, so that the nerd would have reason to keep approaching girls and groups of people forever, until the day he realized that you don't need tricks and specialized techniques to talk to people if you are not retarded: you just... go up to them and talk to them, just like everyone else.
But I am shortchanging the nerds here and being far too harsh on them because chatting up strangers without first having been socially introduced to them is not normal, even in our extremely liberal modern culture, and I wouldn't be surprised if there exist somewhere vestiges of other cultures in which it's even considered rude. (You certainly wouldn't have been advised to chat up random burqaed-up women in the erstwhile Islamic State, for example.) The reality still is that unless you have a very good reason to talk to a stranger—such as if they are a worker serving you in some capacity or other, or if you are a worker serving them; in which case the chat will tend to be confined to a professional level rather than a social one—you will be regarded as weird and your motives as suspicious more or less throughout the Western world; you will not, in other words, be received with anywhere near the openness and warmth with which someone who's coming with a proper social introduction and its implied assurances of trust will be. And that is the brute fact and and obstacle which indirect game was devised to deal with and overcome: instead of engaging the stranger directly on the social level—much less the sexual one, which is the actual goal—the player engages on another, far more acceptable level—such as the aforementioned professional one, for example, or the casual level if he decides like Roosh—the master of indirect game—to pose as someone who's lost and asking for directions—and then, as the interaction develops, he gradually shifts it to ever more personal levels, by small and relatively safe jumps, all the way to the bedroom.
All these techniques of course—which would eventually come to be collectively known as versions of the so-called "cold approach"—could quite plausibly be regarded as extremely deceptive, predatory, and even sociopathic, and in any case certainly as abnormal; so it makes sense that they would be devised by abnormal people to whom social norms didn't mean much and over whom they held little power; either because these people were too stupid and dysfunctional to grasp them (the garden variety nerd), or, in rare cases, because they were too intelligent and high-functioning and independent-minded to stoop to them and bother taking them into account (the geniuses like Mystery and GLL, and the more intelligent among the PUAs, all of whom are naturally introverted and thus to some degree sociopathic). Of course, the inventors of the theories and techniques would belong to the latter group, but the bulk of their adherents would hail from the former (and that's without counting the straight-up fraudsters that would start piling in once the field had become lucrative), and that's how a lot of mischief would be perpetrated, in terms of misinterpretations and exaggerated claims like the all-too common claim of the type that game could net a player any woman anywhere ever no matter the characters of the people involved and their circumstances.
So this was a pretty weird group of people overall, but whatever complaints one might have had against them individually, or as a group, what is undeniable is that without them—without us, because I should certainly be counted amongst their numbers—modern game would never have been developed because socially well-adjusted individuals would never had had enough motivation to invent it—not even those of them who were dissatisfied with their sex lives—because they would have been too uncomfortable stepping out of the norms of social acceptability to experiment sufficiently with the whole structure and thereby figure out exactly how it works, and thus how to best infiltrate it and subvert and dominate it.
But there I go, talking like a nerd too, an outcast from society, about "infiltrations" and "subversions" of "social structures", as if there's some kind of war going on. Yet, isn't the sexual game a kind of war, since the supply of hot girls in any given area is finite, and competition for them is fierce even between naturals? Viewed in this light, a certain degree of hostility towards other guys and perhaps even against girls (the "targets"), on top of the nerd's natural propensity to hostility against the entire social structure that insists on rejecting him, is certainly understandable, even if it is advisable to hide it well from others, and even, in some cases, from oneself. At any rate, the psychological games going on here are many and complex, and closely interrelated, and we've only begun to unravel them, even though we've already gone further in this direction than any PUA ever has or is even able to go. Suffice it to say that if you intend to dominate a field, a certain degree of hostility towards the incumbents is perfectly understandable and even desirable, so let's cut the nerds some slack and not be too harsh on them for it wherever we detect it. There's nothing wrong with being deceptive, predatory and even sociopathic if it's for a good cause; and hot girls are one of the best causes there have ever been.
The Sheer Coldness of Cold Approach
By the way, if I am making it sound as if the nerds invented cold approach, and as if no human had ever spoken to a stranger out of the blue for no apparent reason, that's not by any means my intention, since it's obviously a false idea; there'd hardly be a civilization if that had been the case; there'd hardly be a human species even. What I am saying is that it is a rare event, and thus an awkward one; and as a consequence no one is really good at it and able to use it to full effect. I can't even begin to count the chance encounters in my life with girls who straight-up opened me out of the blue, in the middle of the street in broad daylight even, in my days before pick-up, but which I wasted because I had no idea what to say and how to behave to move the interaction forward. When something like this happens to an untrained person—even to a natural like me—it's so unusual and feels so weird that, throughout the entire interaction, and even long afterwards, the mind is fully occupied with marveling at the fact that such a thing is happening/has happened at all, and there's simply no brainpower left to deal with the actual interaction, let alone to invent on the spot an effective method to guide it, physically and emotionally, from the middle of the street all the way to the bedroom. And if a guy feels this way—which is to say, too stunned to behave smoothly and properly and naturally—you can imagine how a girl will tend to feel in similar circumstances. That's why when you cold approach girls you should remain in the interaction as long as possible—especially if the girl seems to be reacting coldly or apathetically—provided she's not trying to run away from you or call the cops or something. That way you give her time to get over the stunned phase and her brain to catch up with what's happening and appreciate the opportunity that has just landed on her lap, so that she doesn't waste it—because her natural inclination will be to waste it. I have no doubt that a good percentage of the girls I open and get nowhere with are kicking themselves for weeks and months afterwards for not returning my interest, but by that time it's too late, especially if we didn't exchange contact details (which nets us another rule: always push for exchange of contact details, and in the last resort, if she insists on resisting, hand her a business card and walk away—which presupposes that you have a business card to hand her). The most extreme come-on I've ever experienced came from this older German woman in Tenerife a couple of years before I stumbled into game. This wasn't even a cold approach; it was a social encounter with proper introductions, and I still fucked it up. This woman—who must have been in her late-30s or early-40s, but very well-preserved and very sexy in her slutty way—was introduced to me by a friendly German couple who ran a restaurant and nearby bar that I used to patronize frequently in the seaside town of Puerto de la Cruz, where I lived for several years. Once a week or so, usually on the weekend, after they'd close up their bar at around 2AM, they'd gather together their regulars and head over to a bar or club that stayed open until much later, and occasionally they'd manage to drag me along with them too. On that particular night this German woman that I am speaking of came along, and for the entire time we were out she wouldn't leave me alone. She would put her arm around my waist and press herself onto me while our little group walked around the streets; she would chat with me constantly and pay me untold compliments; and she would completely ignore everyone else. All I had to do basically was say "Let's go home", and I would have had her (my place was merely a block away too...), but I was too stunned by her behavior to find the mental presence to do that. When I finally gathered my wits and decided to make a move... she was gone. I looked around the entire bar for her, but she had left without saying a word to anyone, not even to her friends who had invited her over. And, ironically, it was precisely her absence which had allowed me enough of a break from her absurd behavior to catch my breath and gather my wits about me, and decide to fire back at her in kind. But I had taken too fucking long and she had grown bored, or possibly disgusted by my apathy and unmasculine behavior, and she split without saying a word or giving me any way to reach her. I could have asked my friends for her number, but I was too ashamed of my interest in such an older woman. Sexy or not, she was too old for me, and therefore beneath me. Which hasn't stopped me from masturbating with her memory a number of times in the years since. And what have I not done with her in my imagination: I'll spare you the gory details, as it would make even some porn stars blush. Given that I am usually attracted to, and end up with, teenagers, many of whom have reservations about giving a simple blowjob, this woman threw a tremendous opportunity in my lap for some really nasty sex, but due to her lacking game (she hadn't given me a business card, after all), and my non-existent one, it didn't happen. Nor was I a sexually inexperienced youth at the time; this wasn't Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft in The Graduate—I was a 34-year-old man who'd had over 30 sexual partners and over a dozen long-term relationships with girls from three continents and two dozen countries over a period of nearly 20 years. But this stuff just doesn't happen every day; to most people it never happens; so when it does you're not ready for it and are therefore prone to screw it up. Long-time PUAs, and especially the successful ones, inhabit an entirely different mental universe than the normal folk they interact and try to sleep with, so they no longer realize how weird their behavior appears from the viewpoint of anyone who's not a PUA, and therefore fail to make enough allowances for them, just like the German lady who almost raped me failed to do with me. With a little less aggression and a little more patience, plus the sense to exchange contact details with me if I was still nevertheless failing to respond properly to her advances, she would have had me, and doubtless many other guys she must have flabbergasted over the years with her female version of caveman game.
A somewhat less extreme come-on that I've experienced—which however occasioned an equally colossal failure on my part to properly capitalize on it—occurred again in Tenerife, in the same town, barely a block away from the area where the business with the German woman would take place a couple years later. It was past midnight and I was sitting with my laptop on the steps of a small bar—owned by a German acquaintance of mine again (they are everywhere in Tenerife)—working on Insomnia via the bar's Wi-Fi connection. I used to do that a lot in those days because I hadn't set up a connection at home yet, and to ensure a productive session, free of noise and distractions, I'd usually go very late, after the bar or restaurant in question had closed. So there I was, tapping away on my laptop on the steps of this shuttered bar in the middle of the deserted street at one or two in the morning, lost in the contents of my screen and utterly oblivious of my surroundings, since there wasn't a soul, or even a stray cat or dog to attract my attention, when I suddenly became aware of three young people ambling slowly past me in the street in front of me, barely six feet away: a couple walking arm in arm, frequently kissing and being generally all over each other, and a lone girl who was walking alongside them. They were obviously returning home from a night out and were clearly in high spirits and probably inebriated—or at least the couple were, for the lone girl was quiet—but far from any kind of state that I would classify as drunk. So I quickly sized them up with a look, since they were passing so closely by me they had in effect forced themselves on my attention, and then returned my gaze to my laptop's brightly glowing LCD and instantly forgot about them. But the little group had noticed me, and the girl in the couple disengaged from her boyfriend long enough to take a step in my direction and say something to me in Spanish, to which I responded with my usual line that "I don't speak Spanish". "She needs a boyfriend", the girl barked at me, nodding in the general direction of her lone friend, and I was so taken aback by this insanely awkward personal revelation, coming as it did at two in the morning from total strangers, that all I could come up with for a response was something absurdly lame like (because I don't remember exactly what I said), "I am sorry, but I am busy", or, even worse, "No thanks"—the kind of responses, by the way, that daygamers—even attractive, experienced ones—are all too familiar with. So the group kept walking—since the girl had fired her words at me en passant (they'd slowed down, but never actually stopped)—and I spent the rest of the night trying to forget what a great opportunity I'd wasted by focusing on my work. At the time, by the way, I hadn't had sex—or any close contact with an attractive girl—for months, and it had been years since I'd had a real relationship, and you better believe I was hungry for both. Nor am I some lame dude who freezes up and doesn't know how to talk to people; I've already enumerated the vast sexual and relationship experience I had accumulated up to the point (vast by normal person standards, at least; not by those of PUAs who do nothing else in their lives for decades than chase skirts)—without game even, nota bene—which I obviously never would have if I were lame. I am in fact a brilliant conversationalist, but such weird circumstances would have stumped anyone, at least for the first few seconds of the interaction, during which you must be quick on your feet to respond as if the whole business is quite ordinary, otherwise the window of opportunity will close and all the wit and sociability in the world will be useless, even if you do possess them. This is in fact a common refrain among beginner players, many of whom profess to be good at chatting and quite comfortable once the interaction has got going, but awkward and even fearful of it before it has started, and right at the beginning. But that's precisely game—overcoming approach anxiety is 90% of game—or the anxiety of being approached, in the little story of mine that I just related. To give you an idea of how anxiously I had acted then, consider that, after the girl had told me in English about her friend's desire for a boyfriend, I hadn't even mustered the courage to look directly at the girl I was being offered. I deliberately avoided so much as even glancing at her, delivered my stiff reply, and stuck my face back in my screen. You would expect the natural reaction to someone's being offered something to be at least to look at what he was being offered, but in the near-instantaneous deliberations and mental calculations that took place in my brain between the offer and my reply, I felt that taking the offer seriously and looking would have made me seem hungry and thus unattractive, so I went with my instinct—my natural's instinct—and feigned indifference. And this is a good instinct too and all naturals know it and listen to it, because in the kinds of social situations in which naturals thrive, it works wonders. But a real player has to often—and indeed, as I'll be showing later on, he has to usually—work in unnatural and anti-social circumstances, and he has to become comfortable enough with them to make them seem perfectly natural and social, and not be stumped by the kind of tragicomically bad game that girls tend to employ in the rare cases when they can be bothered to actively pursue guys, as in the two examples from my life that I just gave. The girl in my second example was indeed attractive, by the way; I know because I had sized her up in the first look I gave the group when I had heard them approaching. But it was a hasty look so I hadn't formed a clear idea of her in my mind; I registered both girls as "vaguely attractive", but they weren't actual prospects, and I was indeed busy with my work, so I didn't care. Once one of them had become a prospect, I cared, but the unexpectedness of the situation and the speed at which it played out meant that instinct would govern my behavior, and the only instinct I had at the time was the natural's one of feigned indifference. Today, after several years of pick-up theory and practice, I have several other instincts to choose from, depending on the circumstances—and far quicker reflexes to evaluate what's happening and choose between them—and my dominant instinct today in random cold approach scenarios—regardless of who made the approach—is to be friendly and affable and help all participants including myself relax by making simple polite conversation. And that's what I would have done today if faced with a similar situation: I would have first of all looked squarely at the girl I was being offered and smiled at her to dispel the awkwardness, then introduced myself and asked her name, disregarding completely her friend's awkward comment, since I know that this is what she would have wanted. And then I would have proceeded to chat with all three of them about how their night was going, the nightlife in Tenerife in general, their personal situations and mine, and so on. And after a few minutes of this I would have made an excuse, due to being busy with my work, and taken the girl's number, as I've done hundreds of times in various day and night scenarios since. And it's these hundreds of similar experiences that enable me today to act, and indeed to be, natural in a situation that is essentially entirely unnatural to the kind of creatures we are and have been raised to be, and the norms of the society we live in.
My point with these two stories is twofold. Firstly, I want to help you see pick-up from the girl's perspective—which was my own in these examples since I was the one being hit on—and understand that you should never say, "Well, if she had wanted something to happen she would have said or done something". It's quite possible, and probably quite common, for her to want something to happen but to freeze in the moment and not know how to act to facilitate that. I once spent no less than three evenings hanging out with two German girls, one hot and a mediocre one, and by the third night was convinced that the hot one had no interest in me—indeed I strongly suspected that she positively disliked me—and so made out with her friend, who proceeded to tell me, in the rush of honest confessions that often accompany the first make out, that both of them thought I was "super hot" and had been salivating over me since the moment they had met me. Talk about a facepalm! And then I had to sit there and watch the hot one being picked up by an ugly South American dude who was exploiting her momentary vulnerability—occasioned by her friend making out with me and her acquiring "third wheel" status in our little group—to get his grubby hands on her, without being able to say or do anything. But it was a valuable experience because it taught me to always go straight for the girl I really want without paying too much attention to girls' behavior—especially in the initial stages of getting to know each other, when people are prone to acting weird because they don't feel comfortable interacting with strangers. The hot German girl probably thought she was being cool and desirable by acting aloof towards me... and ended up with the ugly South American dude for her trouble. More generally then, since girls' initial reactions to an approach can't be trusted as a guide on deciding how to proceed, advanced game consists in making a solid, dignified approach, and then withdrawing while leaving behind some way for her to get in touch with you if she decides at some point in the future. If she does, the cat's pretty much in the bag if you know what you're doing—and quite possibly even if you don't; if she doesn't, the situation is far from hopeless, but great care must be taken when reinitiating contact to figure out if it's shyness that's keeping her away, in which case calm and relaxed persistence will typically win you the game; or sexual unavailability, in which case you need to back off asap almost completely and either write her off for good, or lightly ping her once every few months to check if her status has changed: all of which has been covered very capably by various PUAs (from whom I learned it in the first place), which is why we won't be getting into it here.
And secondly, and most importantly, I related these two experiences of mine and extensively analyzed them to drive home the rarity, and thus the weirdness, and thus the unnaturalness—the almost anti-naturalness—of cold approach; which, properly understood (as you will be made to understand by the time this book if over), is essentially game, is pick-up. How do we make this strange, unnatural type of interaction seem, and therefore ultimately be, as comfortable and natural as possible, while conducting ourselves as attractively as we can throughout it in the process? This is what 90% of game is all about once you've stripped away—as we'll be doing shortly—all the other concerns and activities that have grown up around it in the years since its invention. I repeat that the PUAs didn't invent cold approach, but they did study it extensively and turned it into a science; which meant that it suddenly turned from a talent into a skill that could be studied and practiced and mastered and perfected. And that's how the nerds, the unnaturals, became what Tom Torero calls "supernaturals", i.e. better than naturals; while the naturals themselves, like me and a few other guys who took the trouble to study this stuff and learn to apply it—despite our already by normal standards successful sex and love lives—became real-life James Bond-like characters (for training can overcome talent only when that talent is untrained; trained talent is unbeatable, is the ultimate, as every teacher in every field knows). Precisely how the nerds became PUAs we've already seen and analyzed in great detail, so let's turn our attention now to understanding and analyzing how the PUAs became naturals, and finally supernaturals and regular Casanovas.
What's in a Game?
It helped a great deal that they dubbed what they were doing with the label "game". Men—and especially young, weak and sexually-inexperienced men—take very seriously women's opinion of them, and a few harsh rejections are all it takes to make them question their own masculinity and value, and swear off the possibility of a sexual dimension to their lives forever. So viewing the whole thing as a game—a role-playing game, ideally, with its focus on conscious acting of various roles being especially helpful here (Mystery and some of this friends were reportedly heavy into D&D)—helped them downplay the seriousness of the whole business and disengage, to a degree, their egos from their results. And this disengagement was essential, was paramount, because without it the prospective player would have no chance of overcoming his approach anxiety, which, while it persisted, would not even allow him to properly play the game. If, on the other hand, he somehow overcame it, success—or at least some measure of it—was inevitable, since as long as you are not clinically retarded or horribly disfigured or something, you are bound to hit on a girl that will be attracted to you sooner or later, if you hit on enough girls. "You don't even need game", wrote Roosh in one of his numerous inspirational blog posts (in the old days of his blog while he still was more inspirational than whiny) in an effort to convince his readers to never lay their arms down and keep approaching all night long like machines, if they wanted to have more successful nights out in their lives than failed ones. This was also the insight that would be later brilliantly expressed in GLL's "Nervous Guy Game", where the beginning player would approach girls, not trying to hide his nervousness, as all other PUAs were advocating, but embracing it, accepting it and harnessing it and flatly confessing it to the girl, and without any tricks and stratagems whatsoever revealing his interest in her and asking for her number. "I don't usually do this so I am feeling rather nervous, but I saw you and thought you looked cute and decided to come over and introduce myself and ask for your number", whereby all nervous behaviors and subcommunications on the part of the player went from being liabilities to truthful evidence that reinforced his approach. Ironically, in the demonstration video that GLL shot to showcase this type of approach, many girls weren't buying his story because he didn't seem at all nervous, but that's precisely the point at which the beginner would arrive if he practiced this type of approach long enough: he'd eventually get used to it and stop being nervous, at which point, like bicycle training wheels, he could shed it and move on to normal game, with the nervousness engendered by approach anxiety having been largely overcome.
What all these mindsets and experiments at length revealed to those, like GLL, who were paying attention, was that even the worst, stupidest game—which Nergous Guy Game was certainly close to being—could work if you tried them long enough, while conversely, the best game in the world would sometimes—and indeed most often—fail. Game, therefore, could not be the only factor that determined success and failure, and perhaps it wasn't even the most important one. Other factors had to play a part and influence the interactions and their results, but in order for the player to stay in the game long enough to discover them he had to grow a thick skin and learn how to deal with, and take in stride, rejection. It is roughly at that point that so-called "inner game" appeared on the scene, which, seen aright, was not so much concerned with how to achieve success, but more with how to manage failure. And, as aforesaid, the whole "it's only a game" angle which the PUAs' very terminology created and encouraged, helped tremendously in this respect, as did all related concepts such as success ratios, notches, flags and all types of stats. The hundred girls who rejected you last week were not real people, under this interpretation of what the nerds were doing, but mere data points in an ongoing experiment, and the entire activity wasn't real but merely a game, because if it were real it would be scary and the nerd would never have left his room to pursue it.
Reality Sets in and the Turn to Self-improvement
The nerds did leave their rooms, however, and therefore inevitably met with some level of success. And since, as everyone knows, success breeds success, that's exactly what was about to happen here, the first step of which was for the nerds—or at least for some of them, the most successful ones—to... raise their standards. We're talking about mostly middle-aged guys who needed textbooks and spreadsheets to get laid, remember, so "success" for them was losing their virginity to 5s and 6s, and at most to the occasional lonely and depressed and horny 7. But once some of them had got to the level of being able to attract such girls with a fair regularity, they were bound to get comfortable at that level and therefore grow sated and bored with it, and cast about for the next level and its higher level of challenge... and rewards. Those rewards were the 8s and 9s and 10s that strutted their stuff in all the night venues in which games was originally developed (daygame was a much later development, that was invented at least half a decade after Mystery Method) and the nerds now began to seriously deliberate on the seriously challenging task of figuring out how to get them.
And the first step in that direction was to observe what kind of guys were already getting them, and then simply try to emulate (or dissimulate, as the case may have been) their attributes and behavior. Celebrities and the wealthy were quickly ruled out as too difficult to emulate, and rapists and kidnappers were never even considered (the nerd's mind never going as far as to regard crime as a possibility, or even a reality beyond books and movies), so what was left after all these alternatives were taken out of the equation were the so-called "bad boys", or, as they would come to be known in PUA terminology in order to borrow some terms from established academic disciplines such as animal ethology and lend the nerds' shady and often bogus theories a veneer of respectability, the so-called "alpha males". Whether the type of leather-jacket-wearing tattoo-covered stoner retards that most girls regard as "bad boys" were really the alpha males of the homo sapiens species (which translates to "man the wise" nota bene) was a detail that didn't appear to bother the nerds very much—indeed none of them seem to have even considered it—; but the dudes were certainly getting laid like rock stars without being rich or famous or in any way accomplished or even good-looking, and so, since eerily enough, the nerds also happened to lack these qualities, these "bad boys" quickly became the model, the ideal of masculinity, that the nerds set for themselves to emulate. "We have to become alpha males!" is the cry that began reverberating sometime around 2008 or so from all the cutting-edge PUA blogs, and above all from the PUA's formerly known as Roissy (now Heartiste). And since hot girls seemed to prefer these "bad boys" over all other types of boys, and since hot girls were, as every nerd knew, the highest authorities on human worth in the land, it followed that "bad boys" were the most valuable human beings to have ever walked the earth, otherwise hot girls wouldn't prefer them. And since the nerds were the most repulsive type of person as far as hot girls were concerned, they surely were the least valuable human beings, and had to find a way to improve themselves, to self-improve, if they ever wanted to lay them. This entire abysmally wretched line of reasoning followed automatically, inevitably like fate, once the nerds had (unconsciously, of course) decided to fully internalize feminine values in order to discover what hot girls wanted, and give it to them. And once Nick Krauser had arrived on the scene and taken this logic and run with it, fully schematizing human society—or the entire universe even—with hot girls at the top, leather-jacket-wearing "alpha" "bad boys" (or "sigma" "bad boys", in the rare moments of clarity when Krauser managed to realize that he was completely alone and no real human being gave a shit about him) right below them, and finally an endless rabble of contemptible "beta", "gamma" and "omega" "chodes" who were completely worthless since, after all, all they had ever accomplished was to take mankind out of its caves and build all of human civilization while the "alpha" "bad boys" (or "sigma" "bad boys"—Krauser never seemed to make up his mind on this distinction) were poking holes into their jeans and choosing leather jackets and tattoo designs, PUA theory had finally managed to perfectly recreate the feminine worldview—the typical 21st century female's conception of how the world works—and the PUAs, by studying it and practicing it and fully internalizing it, had finally become women.
Self-improvement vs. Game
From nerd to woman might seem like a large trip to make, but it isn't really, since effeminacy is precisely one of the key characteristics of nerdhood. All the nerds had to do, therefore, in order to understand women, was to abandon themselves completely to the considerable feminine dimensions of their personalities, and empathy would take care of the rest. After all, wasn't there a significant homoerotic dimension in the nerds' admiration of leather-jacket-wearing and tattoo-sporting "alpha" "bad boys"? Wasn't the breathless, gushing manner in which the nerds related and analyzed the "bad boys'" exploits in innumerable blog and forum posts and badly-written ebooks recognizably homoerotic in nature, since homosexuals are the only other type of person who respects and is attracted to "bad boys" besides women? ("We all want them", wrote Milo Yiannopoulos at some point.) Because of course real men had always viewed such characters with barely disguised contempt; go to every living statesman, military man, bussinesman, craftsman, or man of sciences and letters, and contemplate the opinions and values of all dead ones too, and if you find a single one who respects or ever respected "bad boys" call up the Guinness World Records because you've found something truly extraordinary that they'll be interested in. The only types of people who have ever respected such characters are women, homosexuals... and now PUAs; while all the rest of us know full well that there are teenagers who could beat the everliving snot out of "bad boy" icons such as James Dean. "Rebel without a cause", meanwhile, when properly understood, means "retard"; so if these people are neither physically strong, nor mentally, all they need is a wig and they might as well be women (look at a picture of Krauser with this idea in mind and I dare you to come back here and tell me I'm wrong). And it's worth pointing out that GLL—the only major PUA who can conveivably claim "alpha" or "sigma" status for himself without sending the rest of the planet's population in hysterics—never even once uses terms such as "alpha male" or "bad boy" in his entire website. He uses the far more accurate term "swag factor" to signify the same concept, meaning that vague aura of "coolness" that women find so attractive. He doesn't call it coolness, however, because he unconsciously realizes that real coolness and what women deem cool are not the same thing. Real coolness, after all, was Nikola Tesla creating lightning to order, but Tesla never had groupies, and hot girls don't even know about him. So girls' conception of coolness is a very different thing from the genuine kind (in some ways, almost its opposite), which is why GLL opted for the silly-sounding "swag factor" term, which brilliantly captures girls' inherently silly understanding of coolness. I am 100% certain that GLL didn't consciously pick this term due to the reason I just gave, by the way, but since he is, after all, the only major PUA who's not a nerd, and since he is therefore repulsed by the nerds' effeminate worldview and wants to steer as well clear of it as he can, he built his own terminology from scratch, and under the circumstances it shouldn't be surprising to find that it is immeasurably superior to the PUAs'.
But the showdown between the nerds versus GLL (or GLL vs. Krauser, since Krauser would at length be proclaimed the dominant nerd) would take some time to unfold. In 2008-2010, meanwhile, while self-improvement hysteria was gripping the PUA world, neither of them had quite entered the scene yet; Krauser's marriage was still limping along, while GLL was busy experimenting and studying under various PUAs. And here is where we at last arrive, for the first time, on the issue of the definition of game. Because a growing number of voices were starting to be heard across the PUA world proclaiming that self-improvement was all that mattered, and that all tricks and strategies—pick-up lines, openers, takeaways; even the sacred neg—were useless. The concept of "value" became the dominant concept, which, for women—the theory went—is essentially identical with physical beauty, while for men it is comprised of a number of factors, including looks, health, wealth, education, profession, social standing, etc. All a PUA had to do, according to this theory, in order to attract a girl, was to raise his value above hers—as far above as he could raise it—and "hypergamy" would take care of the rest. Hypergamy, of course—women's alleged desire to land a man whose value exceeded theirs—was kind of a bogus concept, or at least a superfluous one. It was borrowed from anthropology, where the concept "value" was meant in a strict social-status sense, and where therefore the idea of hypergamy is useful and makes sense, it being demonstrably true that for most of recorded history most men would gladly marry women below their social standing, as long as these women were sufficiently attractive, whereas for women the man's social standing mattered more and they would therefore generally aim for the highest status man they could reasonably hope to attain. But that was before sexual liberation, universal suffrage and "equality", and certainly well before the PUAs; that's why gigolos are possible today, and poor good-looking guys can easily marry into wealthy families, something which would have been nigh-inconceivable a mere couple of centuries ago. And anyway, as aforesaid, the anthropological concept of feminine value (=social standing) is not the same with the PUAs' (=physical beauty, or in the man's case, in modern society, "swag factor"), so hypergamy doesn't mean the same thing in the two disciplines. The anthropologists' version is sound but outdated, while the PUAs'... means what exactly? That people want to attract the best sexual partners that they can according to each person's individualy criteria? Then men are "hypergamous" too because they'd all dump their girlfriends and wives in an instant if Kate Upton called them up to ask them out, just as women would dump their boyfriends and husbands if Brad Pitt came calling. The truth was that for the nerdy, resentful PUAs "hypergamy" signified all the times they had been dumped by their girlfriends for better guys, and since they themselves had never dumped anyone, they naturally concluded that "hypergamy"=dumping was a uniquely feminine quality and therefore one on which the nerds' long pent-up resentment could be directed and unleashed. And that's how hypergamy came to join feminism as unholy scarecrow and scapegoat across the PUA world, with innumerable blog and forum posts being scribbled against it on a daily basis as a kind of exorcism ritual, until at last the poor anthropologists' term had been debased to such an extent that Krauser could walk into a Russian club in 2014, observe girls checking out guys despite being in the company of their boyfriends, and denounce this perfectly natural behavior as "hypergamy in action"—in which case men, who demonstrably do approximately a billion times more checking out than even the sluttiest of women, would be about a billion times more "hypergamous" than them. But Krauser didn't like the sound of this fact when I pointed it out to him in his blog post, so he shut his stupid face up and proceeded to lock the comments... (GLL meanwhile, as far as I am aware, has never once touched the concept, what with him being too "hypergamous" himself—far more "hypergamous" than any girl he's ever banged and dumped—to have the time for it).
"Hypergamy" aside, however, it was clear that the PUAs' value-theory and the associated self-improvement creed were basically sound, so the number one contentious issue on cutting-edge PUA blogs towards the end of the decade became precisely how, and in what ways, the PUAs were to improve themselves. And though the stupid "bad boy" ideal was generally dominant, there were still plenty of reasonable voices that advocated a kind of renaissance ideal, entreating the nerds to engage in sports, travel, study and the arts and so on—even in dancing and cooking—in order to become deeper and more multifaceted, more well-rounded men, and thus more interesting and attractive to women; with the ideal type this time being, not a James Dean-type character, but The Most Interesting Man In The World (TMIMITW) as seen in Dos Equis beer commercials.
It was clear by now in what way PUA theory had evolved since Mystery's day. Because Mystery too had been saying that women's attraction triggers were many and varied, and included looks, wealth, social standing and so on; the difference, however, was that Mystery advocated the creation of stories—fake stories—through which the player's prowess in all these categories could be demonstrated to his targets, whereas the new PUAs were telling their students to really become competent in all these categories, and then they wouldn't have to make up stories: they could just tell the truth and women would become naturally attracted to them. "Bad boys" aside, therefore, the two schools of thought largely agreed on what women wanted, and only differed on how players could give it to them: with the new school advocating self-improvement, while the old school championed deception. In addition, recognizing that self-improvement was a long-term goal and that people couldn't be reasonably expected to swear completely off sexual and romantic relationships until they had attained it, the new school advocated a halfway stage dubbed "fake it till you make it" in which players would employ deception to a limited extent—as limited as possible—while working towards their self-improvement goals and gradually phasing out deception as they attained them. At any rate the new school was generally convinced that genuine value trumped deception any day of the week, and thus it was value, and value alone, that should be the master player's ultimate goal. But what all this implied was that there's no such thing as "game", since if ultimate game is self-improvement, the concept of "game" was superfluous since there already existed a wealth of self-improvement authors and literature that utterly trumped anything the PUAs had ever scribbled on the subject, thus implying that PUA literature had been rubbish all along and amounted to little more than a misunderstanding.
Was "game" indeed a superfluous concept and PUA theory a misunderstanding? Countless ebook chapters and blog and forum posts would be furiously scribbled to fiercely argue this point, and very few PUAs would ever be able to make up their minds on it one way or another, and offer a coherent answer; but for two people, at least, the answer was obvious. On the one corner stood GLL who, as the most extreme representative of the self-improvement philosophy—who in his relentless, obsessive quest for it had turned himself into a kind of guinea pig for all types of dubious self-improvement techniques—from steroid-enhanced body-building to anxiolytic drugs and penile enlargement methods—had no respect for game and its gurus, whom he would again and again ridicule as "PUA wizards", and had developed a type of ultra-minimalist "game" that essentially amounted to looking as good as possible and then going up to the girl and saying "what's up"; while, on the other corner, stood Krauser, the most respected of the nerdy "bad boy" PUAs, for whom game did not merely exist but was a towering theoretical discipline deserving of university chairs and thick academic textbooks and constant research (are you seeing the gamma yet?) and who denigrated the idea that anything GLL did could be described as "game". Self-improvement, for Krauser, was certainly useful (although he himself didn't actually practice it, nota bene), but game was something far above and beyond that. Good-looking guy game was therefore not game at all and, as Roosh would later sarcastically quip while summarizing Krauser's views in the thread in which he banned him from his forum, "If you have more than ten hairs on your head you're not spitting true game". What Krauser seemed to be saying, amazingly, was that ugliness (or, more generally, low value) was a prerequisite for "true game"—or at least for Krauser's version of it—but no one seemed smart enough to grasp this, least of all Krauser himself, and it would be some time before even I would see the truth in it and fully understand what it meant, and what it implied. For the moment, at any rate, the PUA world had reached a stalemate, and both sides gave up the debate and barricaded themselves in their respective blogs and forums to hone and refine their respective theories and techniques—without, however, ever touching on the problem again. Because the problem had simply become too complex for regular guys like the PUAs to solve, with their average intelligences and average educations and average experiences, so just as the "Can games be art?" debate had ground to a halt half a decade earlier in the videogame world, and the participants had given up on ever attaining a consensus—or even anything approaching a coherent answer—thereafter nipping all new attempts at a discussion in the bud as pointless or, even worse, as "trolling"; so too occurred in the PUA world once it had reached the depth and sophistication beyond which it is impossible to go without recourse to rigorous definitions and first principles. The problem, in other words, had become at last philosophical—it had attained, that is to say, the kind of complexity which only genius can deal with; and so the specialists in the discipline finally shut up—and in their colorful and highly amusing way shut each other up—until a genius had been found who would take an interest in the problem and come around and neatly solve it for them. And that's where I entered the picture.
