Hidden Options and Fragilities in Daygame

I’ve been working my way through Taleb’s Incerto series and am currently nearing the end of Antifragile. Just Skin in the Game left after that (I’ve skipped Bed of Procrustes as it’s a book of aphorisms). I would have been done sooner but I took a break after reading the first two books back to back and read How to Fight a Hydra (Kaufman) and The War of Art (Pressfield). Those other two books are metaphorical and verge on the metaphorical respectively but together with Incerto they form an excellent series on Inner Game for those who don’t want to dive into the stuff they would label as ‘woo-woo.’

As I am reading Antifragile I’m not only looking at how Game is antifragile itself (you learn from each failure, there are asymmetric returns, etc.) but how Game and its effects on your way of thinking makes your whole life antifragile: not just the sexual/romantic but also financial, locational, etc. That’s the macro level.

At the micro level I’ve noticed all the little options you buy (focusing on Daygame here of course):

Each set is like buying a call option whereby if it goes well you can exercise the option and progress to the date, lay, relationship, etc.

Then there’s the option you grant yourself where you say ‘I’ll just head out for one hour and see how it goes.’ When you follow that strategy, you’re buying an option on your vibe and can exercise it if your vibe is high by staying out longer and approaching more girls. I’ve always found that I only find out what vibe I’m in when my feet actually hit the pavement and so it’s a discovery process. The bad thing to do (beginners aside) is to tell yourself you’re going to do a ‘proper sesh’ when you have no idea if there will be enough sets out there for you to do.

Remember how beginners are taught to ‘Always Be Closing’ (ABC)? That’s an option buying strategy because you never know how the girl might react to your feeler and as a beginner your perception of IOIs will be skewed.

Then you can also exploit the volatile aspect of these options as well, for example by polarising your look and through the weather (with regards to the latter, I am fairly certain that if the weather’s shit but you have a good set then the girl thinks higher of the set and you than if the weather was pleasant; it’s also a harder filter). Remember the higher the volatility the more chance you’ll move into the high payoff scenario and that the low payoff scenario can only be as bad as a blowout.

What about the fragilities of Daygame too? I was thinking more about locations today. Take Oxford Street: it’s a great place to Daygame with the highest footfall of a typical Daygamer’s target market. When there’s no one walking along that street it’s absolutely useless for Daygame. But when 1000 people are walking along its length per hour it becomes useful. Then at, say, 5000 people an hour it hits peak Daygameability: enough people to bounce from set to set but enough space to approach. At a certain point, 8000-10000 people an hour there is simply no space to approach and the Daygameability falls off a cliff.

The same could be said for a Daygame location’s ability to get burned (to begin with the effect of Daygame on a location is negligible but then 10 Daygamers cause more burning that five times that of two i.e. burning is nonlinear because word spreads to people exponentially).

All in all a Daygame location is fragile, but all is not lost because cities have redundancies built in. Oxford Street too busy? Head to Covent Garden. Prague is burned? Jaunt to another city. That’s another way of saying ‘reduce your exposure to the fragile location.’ An old wing told me he’d met a Daygamer who only did Oxford Street, and that when he (very occasionally) went to other places that it was “not Daygame” (not a direct quote I admit). That particular guy had a fragile Daygame strategy; flip that on its head by being able to Daygame different locations.

Yours unfaithfully,

Thomas Crown

P.S. I’d like to write more of these off the cusp blog posts going forward (I hate that phrase as it’s pure management speak but at the end of the day it gets the job done). They are rougher, yes, and they do jump around topics more, but they get my thoughts out of my mind and onto the page where I can start to properly digest them.