Kiev Review

I spent just over two weeks (15 nights) in Kiev and this is my review of the city for Daygame. I travelled with Kaiser and he was there for the first week.

As per usual let’s start with the stats, because that’s what everyone is after anyway:

Stats

Approaches: 92

#/SMs: 36

I-dates/Delayed I-Dates: 3

Dates: 7

Lays: 2

In terms of blowouts I could probably count the number of true blowouts (where she didn’t stop walking at all) on one hand, but there were probably around 10-20 approaches where the first thing she said was “my English bad” or “no English” i.e. a soft blowout. Unfortunately there’s no way to preempt that in the pre-approach (to my knowledge). In terms of the language barrier: just dive straight into the set. I didn’t bother saying “I hope you speak English” because she’s going to or not, and I wouldn’t want to give her an opportunity to leave anyway. I still kept my openers simple, though, “hey you stop, excuse me… I like…” [wave hands around particular thing] “this. It is like…” If I did happen to take a number/SM from a girl with bad English then I didn’t pursue it hard even if she responded. My rule was that I wouldn’t go on a Google Translate date unless the girl seemed very interested.

Taking numbers and Instagrams was easy enough but I didn’t push on the texting if I felt that her response to my feeler was weak (there’s always a chance that the set is weak, but that she was shy, and that she would open up over texting and so I’d often attempt to take numbers from weaker sets). I didn’t record it but the response rate to my feelers was very high (there were probably five or less girls who never responded and the sets were weak anyway). However, and this is a big however, that doesn’t speak for the strength of their responses: getting a solitary smiley emoticon the next day, with no accompanying text, is equivalent to a non-response in the grand scheme of things. That or responding to my feeler with an interrogation over where I was from and why I was there.

As you can see there was a strong #/SM to date conversion ratio – if a girl was responding consistently it was very likely she would come out – but it’s perhaps something to watch out for: I could have gone on a few less dates and used that time to scour the streets for IOIs. I’ll get into the dating experience a bit later on but in Kiev there seems to be a higher chance of going on dates to nowhere, something I’d like to reduce.

Lastly, I’d say one of those lays was a six (SDDL) and the other was a seven (D2) (the reports will come out soon for them), which segues nicely into…

Quality

In Kiev there are tonnes of sevens, and a healthy smattering of eights, but… I have to admit: I’ve found that Ukrainian girls aren’t really my type. Ukrainian girls often believe that they are the hottest girls in the world, the downside of which is that a lot of them walk around with that kind of “model scowl” on their face as if they’re too cool for school. I don’t like that and much prefer girls who show real emotion. Also, their fashion can be dull, a bit too pulled-straight-off-the-Zara-mannequin, or alternatively, too wacky/postmodern/nihilistic. My overall impression is that there are a lot of girls here who are “merely attractive” but I never felt that kind of consuming desire to approach unless I thought there would be a higher probability of a lay (from an IOI, for example).

In terms of nationality it is 99% Ukrainian; I think I met less than five girls from other countries. That compounded the problems from the above paragraph and also it limits any kind of geography stacking you’ve got planned.

The good news for guys travelling to Kiev is that there are a mixture of r and K girls. So for those who specifically want a K-selected girl and are willing to wait then you can go on your gorillion dates and get a nice girlfriend. If you’re looking for fast lays then don’t allow yourself to get sucked into the belief that “Ukrainian girls are all good girls and you won’t get fast sex” (not that all the guys in the former camp have this belief, moreso that this is a mindset to avoid especially if you’re looking for fast lays). Instead, see them all as just girls and get filtering; some are slaggier and some are just horny. We’re all just hairless apes anyway so don’t believe the Instagram hype where a 6.5 can turn herself into an 8; in fact it’s probably best to stay off of a girl’s Instagram feed as much as possible due to the extent of retouching applied (it will just make you overinvest in any one girl).

Find the girls who like your archetype by looking out for IOIs and move quickly towards a date; the next day if possible. If she IOIs you, and you’re not in the middle of your number farm, then I’d recommend asking about her plans for the day and try to move towards an i-date. If you got an IOI but you’re unsure whether it was a true one – whether the girl is strongly interested or not – then you can easily see if she’s up for meeting later on and use the time break as another filter. Try as best you can to pounce on your opportunity – FSU girls seem to exhibit the split personality depending on their cycle phenomena more than any other girls I’ve encountered – or get started on the dates (in case she’s one of those girls who does want sex but not before X dates).

The guys here are, in the majority, chodey with bad fashion and haircuts and are overweight. There are quite a few local Daygamers too and it’s easy to spot their shitty approaches on Khreschatyk: the main Daygame street. Put simply: if you’re going there on a trip and you have some style, you’ll stand out immediately from the competition. But you still need to have style: if you dress like a chode, even if you’re a foreigner, then the girl will treat you like one.

In Kiev – and I’d guess in Ukraine in general – the local guys have accepted the deal on the table: date a girl for months, stump up the flowers, gifts and entertainment, and eventually she’ll “feel comfortable enough” to sleep with you. Who knows when that point will actually come: the cynic in me would say it’s when she thinks that you believe the sunk costs to be so high that you won’t pump and dump her; the optimist in me would say it’s a subconscious point where she feels that she can “be vulnerable” around you and give herself fully to the relationship. Who knows. I’ll get back to dating later on.

Daygame Experience

I found the Daygame experience in Kiev to be fine, something I alluded to in the stats section when referencing the number of blowouts and the rate of number collection. However, there are two big points which make Kiev feel below par compared to the other places I’ve been to before (Prague and Warsaw).

The first is the time of day to Daygame. There is no proper midday rush hour which makes the 5-8pm rush the absolute best time to do sets. Apart from that the streets are just a bit quiet. Our typical day would include starting Daygame around 1 or 2pm, doing a couple of laps of Khreschatyk, before walking uphill to Golden Gate and along the curved street all the way to Paul (Zavod Burgers on the map below; it’s just that Paul stood out to me more as something to look out for), before turning around and going all the way to the university and Shevchenko Park, before finally coming back to Khreschatyk for another lap and a quick rest, and then into the evening rush (map below). It makes each day feel as if you’re waiting for this one big event whereas I would rather be spreading the sets out throughout the day with less pressure.

Here’s a disclaimer: I went at the end of September when the weather was so-so. Maybe during the spring, when it’s sunny, but university is still in, you’d have more girls just randomly wandering around during other times of the day. That’s not to say we couldn’t get sets in. I think I did about 70 sets in the first eight days because I was actively trying to get volume in by approaching girls who gave off less signal. It’s just much better to approach when the streets are busier, not just for the higher volume, but because it causes people to walk closer together and so it’s easier to spot IOIs.

The second issue is that there really is only one good Daygame street in Kiev – Khreschatyk – and everyone knows it. It means that there ends up with a lot of Daygamers there, especially as right now Ukraine is one of the few countries that you can travel to without needing to quarantine. Now, I don’t quite believe a place can be burned: if a girl ran into her celebrity crush then she would talk to him for sure, and so it’s still just a relative value proposition. But there is a chance that a specific girl can get burned, say, if she gets approached a lot in one small period, causing her to need an extra special opportunity (very high SMV) to stop. The other places I mentioned above are also decent but you won’t find yourself approaching a tonne.

Dating Experience

If I had to sum up the dating experience in Kiev it would be that “every girl has her agenda.” Don’t take that in a bad way – that girls are going to maliciously tool you (only some, it won’t happen to you properly if you have your boundaries and watch out for red flags, but more on that later) – but do understand that this is a game of incomplete information and the girl holds the cards in terms of how fast she’ll sleep with you. She may know that it will take exactly [X] dates for her to have sex and that she won’t have time to have [X] dates with you while you’re there, but she’ll still come out for the first date. It’s your job to turn up, escalate, and get her to show her cards. Learning to accept that this is the setup will mean your vibe doesn’t take a hit when you go on dates to nowhere. The flipside to this coin is that some girls are looking for fast sex because of their personality or it’s the right part of their cycle, and so if you present yourself at the opportune moment then you can get sex very easily. Obviously you have to be a sexworthy man to take advantage of that and not be a chode.

I had a good mixture of coffee and alcohol first dates, and discovered a fair few of those girls who came out had put me in the “make him wait” box – even though they already knew I was only on holiday – along with those who turned up wanting/expecting sex (the two lays). I think while I was there there was only one date where I made a big mistake, where I overdid the PDA. It was close to the start of my trip and I should have rolled off and gone for a second date lay. It taught me that in Kiev you shouldn’t try and use kissing as a means to heat girls up and should instead stick to speaking lower and slower and emphasising the male/female polarity. I also had one example where I think I would have got the lay on a second date but didn’t have time to go through with it.

One thing Kiev has taught me a lot about is plausible deniability. Ukrainian girls seem to be extremely concerned about what other people think about them, even if they are never going to see them again. It must be baked into their biology. A girl might be leaning forward and touching you over a coffee, but if you try and kiss her later on, even somewhere relatively isolated, she might easily reject it. Another example was the second lay I got: we were literally in an empty room in a bar and I told her “let’s go back to mine for one last drink” and she said she couldn’t hear me. I repeated myself, and I swear she pretended not to hear what I was saying. Instead she just said “I can’t hear you, you just lead.”

I remember Torero partially branded himself on the magic side of things (part of his “street hustle”) and in magic you have suspended disbelief: you know it’s a trick, a sleight of hand, but you let yourself be lead along, because at the end of the day you want entertainment. The same with going to see a movie: you don’t pause and think these are just actors against a green screen. It seems that suspended disbelief holds in Kiev more than any other place I’ve been. The girls prefer “the lie” (“let’s go for a walk”… which ends at my place). In London the same thing could blow up in your face: you tell her you’re going back to yours for one last drink (and she doesn’t pretend not to hear) because if you simply walk her home she thinks you’re trying to trick her somehow.

Returning to a girl’s “agenda,” there was only one case where I think the girl was trying to act maliciously, and I had been suspicious from the start with her as she had given me a very strong IOI but then had made things too easy. She also commented on how different I looked to everyone else (meaning she thought “here’s a foreigner I can milk for expensive stuff”). She kept on trying to steal the frame and get me to meet her near to, what I expected were, expensive venues. In the end we met somewhere in the middle and I led her to Maidan (she wouldn’t meet me there initially because she “didn’t like it there” and wanted to show me “beautiful places” somewhere else). We walked in and she immediately started to complain that she didn’t like the place. Then she started trying to throw me off by saying she “understood psychology and [could] see that [I] thought [I] was better than her.” We had one quick drink and when she saw that I wasn’t going to cave and go to any “beautiful places” she started to order an Uber. Seeing that all I could do was throw a Hail Mary and invite her back to my place, I offered it, to which she started to go into some speech about “do you think that would work?” and “I am the kind of girl men fight over.” I got my jacket and walked out during her first sentence.

The moral of the story is to have your boundaries: know what you want and get to work understanding what she wants. If there’s no coincidence, then end the date prematurely (obviously if she’s playing the Game in good faith then don’t do it rudely like I did in this example). Also, watch out for red flags. In this case it was how when I met her she said she had just left an expensive hotel rooftop bar, had an American phone number, made the set way too easy, flashed me an almost too strong IOI, and – most importantly – wouldn’t meet at the place I suggested and wanted to meet in a more expensive part of town. I was suspicious from the start and things just kept on adding up. Luckily, I knew that there were some girls like this in Kiev and so I had a plan: take her to a place that I know and choose, don’t let her lead anywhere else, and escalate to see where she stood.

In terms of flakes, they mainly came towards the end of the trip where the girls knew that I would be leaving a few days later and I guess that they didn’t want something so fleeting. That leads me onto something: at no point during my trip did I try to convince girls that I was coming back as a way to try and weasel my way into their pants. If a girl asked me why I was there I simply said that I was travelling and Ukraine is one of the few countries you can go to without having to quarantine. If they asked when I was leaving I gave the true answer and if they asked whether I would come back I said “no.” I accept that if I were willing to do repeat trips and Long Game that I could close some of those leads, but I’m not. Instead I’d preferred to try and create scarcity with the girls who were interested. And to be honest I think that if you try the former method, and tell girls that you’re going to return, then they are just going to test that hypothesis and agree to meet you again… the next time you’re there.

Lastly, let’s talk about date venues. I stayed near Maidan and I think it is the best place to stay. You’re two minutes away from Khreschatyk and I counted nine date venues in the streets leading off of the square: a good mixture of coffee and alcohol. You also have the supermarket Novus right next to you.

There’s also Porter Pub on Khreschatyk which Krauser talks a lot about in his memoirs: it’s a dive bar so the vibe is great but you probably shouldn’t take any typically “good girls” to that place because you’ll spoil the experience for them (my guess is that they wouldn’t want to be seen there, or even going in or coming out, and so you’d ruin the plausible deniability; for them the rebelliousness comes from the unspoken sexual tension rather than a rebellious environment). There’s also a nice cafe on Khreschatyk called “The Journalist” which is a good coffee venue and fishing spot. It’s quite useful to get girls to meet you there just so you don’t have to make a detour to do an odd coffee date. Between Porter and The Journalist there are two more alcoholic venues – Mushyla and the cherry wine bar – where you can also fish and/or take an i-date.

Kiev Itself

Kiev is a drab place, to be honest. While there are some nice places – especially Kiev Food Market – and some nice parks, there’s a lot of greyness. The tourist attractions didn’t appeal to me either and are usually just a monument.

In terms of costs, they’re lower than Prague and Warsaw, but still not dirt cheap. If Prague and Warsaw were “cheaper but not cheap,” Kiev was “cheaper-er but not dirt cheap.” Here’s a rundown of costs:

• A good coffee costs between £1 and £1.50
• A house beer is normally the same price
• A strong drink with a mixer was between £3 and £5 depending on how fancy the place was and how strong the drink was
• A main meal at a restaurant was typically £5-£8
• My apartment cost me £24 per night
• I ended up paying about £40 for a month-long gym membership at Workshop Fitness and a day pass was around £8. I only ended up going to the gym five times while I was there so I think I won’t go for short term memberships on future jaunts and instead go fewer times and do full body workouts. I went three times in the first week but by the second I was feeling lethargic and didn’t want to use my energy at the gym and so only went twice.

I think that overall you could make a trip to Kiev quite cheap, especially if you made breakfast and lunch at home each day. I’d still go out for dinner each evening since it’s not expensive and the dinner and drinks with your friends is one of the best social elements of any trip.

Lastly, one thing that stood out to me was the quality of the coffee. The best coffee shops I found were Bru Cafe near Maidan, Big Wave Coffee on Khreschatyk, and Takava Coffee at the end of Khreschatyk (where I went nearly every day before each session). Here’s a tip to find good coffee: when you see a rating out of 100 on the side of a coffee bag, that’s the Specialty Coffee Association (SCA) score. Anything above 85 is considered really good and so if you see a shop offering filter coffee with this then it’s probably a good coffee shop.

Would I Go Again?

Probably not for a long time as I think I’d rather go to Warsaw where there was a much nicer Daygame route, as well as a wider range of nationalities and fashion styles. I also didn’t get the “agenda” vibe in Warsaw in that it’s more similar to London where the assumption is that sex will happen if you get along and you don’t fuck things up, and mostly within a reasonable timeframe. I also don’t think there’s anything special about Ukrainian girls – yes there are good looking girls but they’re not exactly my type – and I don’t see K-selected/good girls as being inherently better (I’m after fast lays, and so wouldn’t change my ratings of my girls based on whether I thought they were one or the other type; it’s purely on looks).

Yours unfaithfully,

Thomas Crown

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