To be read alongside the lay report
*****
Gutter Game: I don’t have much experience with Gutter Game but what I can say is that I didn’t do enough of it on the jaunt, especially on the earlier days. If I had done a cursory loop of the Daygame route between 11pm and midnight each day (I was often watching football until 11pm anyway) then I might have picked up an earlier lay. And now having seen the change in vibe between pre and post lay I see how important it is to gun it on every possible front.
60 Approach Number Farm: I didn’t know how many sets to aim for so asked Mr White and he recommended 60 approaches; it sounded about right. It was around my approach to lay ratio from last year and so I thought that I could roughly get a lay with that many approaches. I imagine this can be scaled up and down depending on your length of stay, wings, skill level and appetite.
Statistics for Inner Game: part of why statistics are so useful for a Daygamer (up to a certain point) is that they give you a rough idea of how you should be doing. If you’re A:L is 100:1 then you know that if you do 100 sets this month you can reasonably expect a lay. Then if you hit your 150th or 200th set without a lay, you know it’s time to analyse what’s going wrong. It might be a false warning due to bad luck but it might also be the signal that something important has changed. Without this rough idea of knowing how often and how many girls will move to the next level of the process it becomes a black box; it’s harder to connect what you’re doing on the street to the texting, dating and lays. At that point it does feel like a numbers game where you’re literally shovelling maximum slop into the funnel. It means that each set lacks purpose beyond enjoyment in the moment, but if the point of a jaunt is to get laid then a level you’re only kidding yourself that it’s worth it. It means you wake up in the morning wondering ‘what’s the point?’ I said it felt like being a beginner again because this is what Daygame feels like before you’ve seen the whole process through to completion.
Special Dispensation Wing: most of the time when someone gives me a platitude I think ‘I already knew that,’ but somehow I’ve given Mr. S – a relentlessly positive wing – special dispensation in my mind. When he told me to keep on pushing, that I never knew where the success would come from, I nodded and then went out to do more sets. This is a useful mental trick to pull on yourself which can clearly pay dividends.
Mutuality: in this case I was pushing for mutuality quickly as a filter. By taking a girls hand and caressing it slightly there on the street I was trying to find out if she was DTF. That’s escalation and so might have scared off the Maybes but for some it would push them up into the Yes category because girls with strong interest enjoy the mutual IOIing. In fact this is what beginners do all the time: always try for a long hand hold, and that’s because it’s a filtering technique. Remember most of beginners advice is designed to reduce AA and filter for the odd Yes girl.
Daytime/Nighttime Intent: one of the biggest differences between Daygame and Nightgame is how you show intent, or how you mask your intent for the latter. As it shifts into the nighttime (though still in the Daygame arena) the fact that you’re approaching her becomes obvious; giving overt verbal IOIs might make you out to just be a drunk. For a man to start talking to a girl, with strong eye contact, at 11:30pm, the intent is obvious.
Wing Rules: don’t just run off from your wing to do a set leaving them standing there like a numpty. Always let them know you’re off to do a set and if you go for an idate message them to say you’ve gone for one (I did this immediately as Alina and I walked along).
Opener: now I think of it, asking her whether she speaks English is actually the opener, not the compliment/tease that follows it. Or to be specific asking whether she speaks English is an opener because it begins a conversation. It’s good not to lose sight of things like openers and street stops: they have a specific purpose and once that’s fulfilled they’re done. So for example there’s no perfect stop and there’s no perfect opener, just sufficient ones. The interesting thing was coming back to London and opening in the same way on girls who were clearly English and having them being like “erm yeah?”
Defiance: this could be taken as bitchiness on the surface but don’t let that fool you. Of course I don’t have pictoral, video or audio evidence of my opener but I think it’s easy to tell whether defiance is just the girl trying to pick a fight (the offended-to-be-approached girls) or whether it means she’s bit hard. Alina bit hard. Once you have this information showing amused mastery and standing firm in the wave of her subcommunicated assault is just going to turn her on. Sometimes I think of it this way: these girls are trying to give value to the interaction through humour but their personality only permits sarcasm. That’s why you get responses like Alina’s (it wasn’t really witty, it was information).
Body Language: a small point but one I will especially make for tall guys: watch out for leaning forward. I was doing this thing where I would strain my neck forward especially when talking to girls with poor English to such an extent that I could feel the strain releasing after set. You’ve almost got to talk down your nose at girls and have your chin pointed at their forehead. Then you need to tip your shoulders back so that the angle of your body is beyond 180 degrees. I’ve always had an issue with posture such that when I walk – without noticing – I look like a neanderthal: torso slanted forward and arms swinging around. It takes conscious effort to solve this.
I Get What I Want: as cocky as that sounds it’s true 90% of the time. The girl needs to see the desire in your eyes because it raises a whole bunch of questions otherwise. Why would you talk to her if you didn’t seem genuinely interested? Was it a dare? A social experiment? Are you just going to pump and dump her? Showing strong sexual desire through eye contact is attractive to her. And so long as you are aiming in the realm of possibility when it comes to quality, together with good Game, the higher you aim the better your chances.
SDL Venues: for an SDL attempt you want to keep things as normal as possible. Walking a girl off the street and straight into a dark cocktail bar would be too sleazy; it ruins the secret society vibe of the SDL. In truth SDLs either happen without a hitch (but a lot of nervousness on the Daygamer’s part!) or not at all. In fact the best course of action is to normalise things. In this case, my first choice of venue was actually a typical Czech restaurant which served cheap beer. With that closed I went to somewhere much more date-y but that was only because I needed to get her to a venue fast. And then with that unavailable too, I did a cost/benefit analysis in my mind and went for another Czech restaurant which was a five minute walk away, but much closer to my house. For example I could have taken her to an Irish pub – McCarthy’s – which was literally two doors down, but I knew it would be full of loud guys on their stag dos and maybe even a band. No, I didn’t want that, I wanted two things mainly: an opportunity to talk (to heat her up) and an opportunity to normalise things. Therefore I went with a Czech restaurant five minutes walk away. That walk can feel like an eternity especially as the girl thinks to herself ‘I’m following a stranger down a dark street’ and so you need to fill it with blabber, hence…
Focused Blabber: filling the walk with unfocused blabber would have been fine too, but I took the opportunity to draw attention to her life in Russia compared to her life in Prague. About how in Russia there were certain expectations of girls but that here in Prague she could ‘be herself,’ be free, and do what she wanted.
Pints of Beer/Cider: I always offer girls the choice between ‘a big manly pint or a little girly half’ (fuck the metric system, I said it in Prague too!) to test where they’re at. If a girl orders a pint then she wants to ply herself with alcohol to increase the plausible deniability. I happily indulged her.
Waiters: don’t let the waiter fuck with you. He probably thought that because I was with a girl that I wouldn’t want to cause a fuss, putting me in a catch 22 where I either took the wrong order on the chin on was forced to correct the order. That’s his beta Game and his beta expectation of the world at work. Instead he unwittingly created an opportunity for me to DHV. I knew she enjoyed it because she smiled and giggled a little.
Pulling Her Chair Over: this is a fun dominant move which you can do to spike a girl and increase the proximity. If she’s interested in you then she’ll absolutely love it.
Calibrating the Kiss: Alina went immediately for a make-out and I obliged her. Usually I would start with a few light kisses before going in for a full-on smooch. It was just another piece of information that was telling me that tonight I would bang her.
Overplaying the Questions Game: this wasn’t the kind of situation where I just needed to stoke her fires again and again and again. I just needed for her to make The Switch (which I kind of had to assume in this circumstance anyway). I find that in the Questions Game you’ll reach a point, naturally, when you just run out of interesting questions to ask. When you get here, just stop.
Cash: I don’t usually carry cash in London because everywhere takes card but really I should always carry some for quick bounces. To be honest, in London, the good thing is that you usually pay for the drinks before you have them. In Prague this was a different matter because some places didn’t take card and most places would start you a tab. The worst thing about paying by card when you want to bounce is that the waiter has to come over, look you and the girl up and down, and take his sweet time getting the machine ready. Don’t let the waiter raise the girl’s ASD.
Post Lay Texting: this is a good opportunity to gather some further information so use it.
*****
From the very start this lay reminded me of a Street Attraction infield I watched at the Krauser/SA talk in March. Adam (I believe) approached a girl sitting in Piccadilly who gave a bit back, before being stood up and given a long hand hold. He then walked her to St James Park before back to Leicester Square and onwards to his place. Now, a lot of that was done for camera, and so Adam can definitely be excused for Krauser’s quick comment to me afterward: that he got the lay in the first ten minutes and then afterwards it was just unnecessary risk. I had this ringing in my head the whole time.
I paired up her initial reaction to the infield I watched and made an assumption that she was DTF. I even stood in the same way that Adam did in the infield. Then I knew I just needed to guide her back to my place. In fact, the Questions Game probably went further than I needed considering she would probably sidle over to me in the restaurant anyway. Although, in her own words she was ‘8/10 turned on by the time we left the restaurant.’ I can’t know for sure but this thought – of overplaying my hand – definitely called me off when I was running out of questions.
Thomas Crown PUA 