The Basic Skills Test For Game

Amid an explosive discussion at Dalrock about the knowledge of game in wider society*, commenter Jack penned a brilliant treatise on the basic outline of a good game toolbox. It’s as simple as three steps.

1.) Active Disinterest and how it utterly drives women crazy. (ignoring calls, proper frame control, taming your desire to overtly advertise your interest to her. eliminating your desire to emote)

The first detailed writings I saw on this exact topic (save for Leykis 101′s crude tips like don’t answer the phone on the weekend) were from Mystery. The problem is this: you can show a lack in a woman by not talking to her and not being around her; however, she won’t have any reason to get interested in you because you are not in her space. To get around this, Mystery developed a series of gambits to to stay socially engaged with a woman but to exude an aura that you were not actually interested in her. For this he deployed the body rock, isolating a woman in a group setting, and the neg. No game blog has arrived until it’s had a long and pointless debate about negs, and almost every discussion gets it wrong at some point. A neg is not about “lowering a woman’s self-esteem.” It was designed as a display of non-interest, a comment that a man who was into the woman would never make (the word he used in an oft-quoted post on the matter was “snub” – to deny someone attention).

Among many other men, I can vouch for seeing a woman’s interest in me take a dramatic tick upwards when I withdraw signals of my own attention and interest, watching her eyes scramble as she tries to find a way to get it back. It’s a bit disheartening to really internalize this lesson – you realize how shallow many women really are in this arena, and you recognize that in all those years of seeing women go nuts for guys who couldn’t give two licks about them, at least some of those cases were little more than the denial of attention itself (combined with even a modest kernel of attraction) – the girl wanting something shiny she couldn’t have.

I can also vouch for the converse – myself and many others have seen first-hand in our own love lives how even a smidgen of too much interest too early can and will punch us a one-way ticket to Celibacy Point. The need for today’s men to show a distinct LACK of outward interest in a woman he’s actually pursuing has been observed, noted and even encouraged by today’s young women. Men who are paying attention learn that a true emotional disclosure and logistical investment is dangerous to his sex and relationship prospects. And then today’s women complain they can’t get a guy to open up and stick around. You got what you ordered, girl.

As Roosh tweeted pithily: “The game is so fucked up in USA that if you push the wrong button on your phone and accidentally call her, she may write you off completely.”

The extreme version of showing lack of interest is instilling dread. Even accounting for Roissy’s trademark hyperbole and overstatement, a true dread campaign is a last-resort measure whose efforts would be better spent capturing the affections of a new, more cooperative woman.

2.) Women shit testing you and how you must pass these shit tests to be seen as higher value. (her bringing up other guys, her testing your frame, her stirring the pot, her testing the boundaries)

Much has been written on fitness testing and I don’t want to rehash too much of it. I really liked the idea of fitness testing as a girl “rubbing up against your manhood” – sometimes it’s not a test but rather an induction for you to display traits she knows you have but enjoys seeing/experiencing again.

Like the active disinterest of point #1, fitness tests are the pitching of a power struggle in which the winning move is not to play. The fitness test is all around us; once you know to look for it, you see all sorts of these tiny synthetic power struggles all around you. Fitness tests are set up as a double-win situation – if the guy passes, the woman feels secure in her man’s strength and social wiles; if he fails, she usually gets a freshly-revealed chump to do something she could have done for herself.

The trouble is that guys have been taught from their youth that the way to “earn” a woman’s love is to serve women’s most petty requests in holding their purses and doing for them anything they ask for in either a squeaky tone of voice or an enraged yell. Plugged-in guys don’t understand that in a lot of cases, women secretly want you to say no – the way to her heart is to deny that which she is asking. Sometimes they don’t even know that’s what they want, until you do say no and they feel this comforting wave of security come over them – the test was itself subconscious, but she feels the satisfaction of the man passing it.

Fitness testing and frame were key discussions in one of Roissy’s most important posts, “Relationship Game Week: A Reader’s Journey.” In this tome, Roissy quoted at length the comments of Keoni Galt (under the pseudonym Dave From Hawai’i) in which he described employing some game techniques to transform his marriage from a typically henpecked, naggy enterprise into a once again happy and productive partnership with a fully-functional sex life. I’ve called this “the most important post in Manosphere history,” as it took the techniques and mindset of PUA game directly into the marital sphere – abjectly lapping the milquetoast work of dozens upon dozens of relationship-psychology and self-help authors across a generation. It really is worth a full read.

Athol Kay has a few good nuggets on fitness testing. One is that not everything is a fitness test. Another related one is that you can do some favors from your mate without worrying about losing her attraction, but no request should be serviced if it’s an unreasonable request, or is delivered in an unreasonable tone of voice. Some would say this is treating your woman like a child; I rather see it as demanding an adult woman to exhibit the same manners that we try to inculcate into children we’re raising to be responsible adults.

3.) Approaching and asking for the number. (you cannot hit if you don’t swing, women want you to approach, the vast majority of men NEVER do it.)

It’s not that complicated. If you’re going to pursue women, you need to meet them first. You need to get over the anxiety. You need to ask for the money, so to speak. You see a woman you like, you start talking to her, and make sure to give her an opportunity to see you again. Think about it: your typical blue-pill man probably makes less than 50 real approaches IN HIS LIFE! Go to any singles bar any night of the week and see how many guys are standing around holding their dicks peering over at the girls they lust after but wouldn’t dare actually make a move on. If you are a regular, habitual approacher, you are in the top 5% of men in the sexual-marketplace inventory simply by that fact alone. You are making your future happen – be in charge of your own life.

Jack wraps it up:

Once I understood those three core concepts, I’ve been able to pull far hotter chicks on a much more consistent basis, which eventually leads you to a place that every man must be in order to feel comfortable in his skin around his hot girlfriend and thus be able to keep her…..A mentality of abundance.

Which is the ability to internalize the thought that if this chick i’m with dumps me, screws me over or withholds sex, I can replace her. It might take me a month or two to find someone else of equal sexual attractiveness, but I can replace her and she knows it. It is not a belief that can be faked, because a woman can smell a fraud.

And that my friends is game. And that is where you must be mentally in order to have a healthy and sexually active relationship.

The man is spot on. I made the point in the Dalrock thread that most guys do NOT want to be long-term players, picking up new chicks on the regular and filling a black book with booty calls. Sure, it sounds like a nice fantasy, but most guys don’t have what it takes to really enjoy that kind of lifestyle per se. Most guys who get into game are doing it for exactly what Jack describes – not the abundance, but the abundance mentality. The confidence that they don’t have to be solely at the mercy of their woman’s choice; if they wind up single, they can find another woman of equal value without much trouble. Paradoxically, that kind of confidence is what can keep his one woman satisfied with him. Nothing turns a woman off like the idea that she is her man’s only option.

What these men are looking for is the tragically unfulfilled promise of the blue pill philosophy – that he can have a healthy relationship with a decent woman if he’s willing to put in a little bit of effort. Once you’ve climbed the hill of getting your mind and your game right, it IS a “little bit of effort,” a non-consuming aspect of your well-lived life.

Active disinterest, fitness testing, and the need to approach. Learn it. Know it. Live it.

*My opinion, which is mirrored by a significant sample of commenters on the thread, is that the knowledge of game is becoming mainstream in the culture, yet its practice and adoption continues to be among a distinct minority. Myself and others independently likened it to the obesity situation in America – despite the fact there has never been MORE freely-available information and plans and strategies to eat well and work out, there’s clearly a small (ha) group of people getting more fit while the general public balloons.

The Close Line

One of the typical struggles in the novice gamester’s experiences is getting the number smoothly.

Now, some guys insist that in night game, a number is next to worthless. To be honest, I’ve found that in a bar/club environment when you’re dealing with a woman who is inebriated and acting out of what she perceives to be her character, she may get your call or text the next week and decide she wants to forget that night entirely. Part of the fun of going out for girls is the dressing up in costume and “playing” someone else for a bit. That means she’s going to see whatever bond she may have forged with you as incongruent and not redeemable for further contact.

But if you can’t move the encounter further along (either through a location bounce or a trip home to attempt the seduction), your only option is to get some contact info so you can try to pick up the pickup later. And in day game, escalation is almost always off the table, so getting a number is THE end goal of the day-game encounter.

DON’T ASSUME A FRAME OF MEEK RELUCTANCE

I think guys have frame problems with number closing because in night game, you only go for the number if you’ve been stymied and thus rejected in some way. It takes some effort to keep bad game from leaking out in a dripping, underwhelming “well what if I got your phone number and maybe we can you know meet up later and like have a coffee or something?”

As with other factors of game, it’s important to not take the premature end of the night personally; she could have promised to drive her friend home, she could be ragingly hot for you but had a bad experience with her last SNL, perhaps her friend cockblocked you and she’s going to make it up to you next time she sees you, or maybe she’s just really tired and knows she can’t make it happen that night. A lot of these are bullshit that guys tell themselves to salve the pain of rejection, but no matter what, you won’t get anywhere getting butthurt or angry that you’re not getting laid that night.

It’s important to understand that it doesn’t make you beta to have closing anxiety; lots of guys who are very successful with women do, and in fact the game writer Dagonet (The Quest For 50) said he broke out of a game rut when he started going after hotter women who gave him that heart-pounding-in-his-chest feeling. My track coach had a saying that if you didn’t have some butterflies, you probably weren’t ready to race as you hadn’t properly addressed the magnitude of the competitive event. You get a little nervous? It’s OK. (What DOES make you a beta is if you can’t execute the number close with a woman who is signalling that she is interested in you.)

SOFT BUT BOLD

So, how about that number?

I’ve cribbed a line from Roissy and dannyfrom504 that has brought me much success, and fits well with my “still waters run deep” style of presentation.

After announcing your intention to leave (or receiving hers), say “would you like to continue this conversation later?” This has to be said with outcome-indepedent nonchalance, or she’ll get that trying-to-save-face-from-a-rejection vibe we just talked about. Her body-language reaction will tell you if she’s about to give you a pity number or actually wants to see you again. Then you hand her your phone and have her punch in her number and name (bonus opportunity for some cheap kino at the same time).

This line is great because:

It makes clear what you want without being domineering: There’s no permission-seeking wishy-washyness like “maybe we can hang out sometime?”

It’s overtly non-sexual: Unless you’re talking with a bona fide slut or the sexual boundaries of the conversation have already been breached, you have little to gain and a lot to lose by going sexual in your close like “why don’t we get together again and finish what we started.” And if it’s a daygame approach, a sexual close is a non-starter.

It’s subtle: At the same time, it feeds the hamster – by giving you her number, she’s not committing to a “date” or anything serious and heavy like that, just to “continue the conversation,” which itself leaves her wondering what your intentions are. You both know in your gut that it’s more than just more chatting, but she doesn’t have to rationally acknowledge it, which maintains uncertainty and thus helps keep her anticipation level up. You are already setting up the quasi-spontaneous “it just happened!” frame for your next encounter.

It’s tempting: Rather than begging her to give you a chance to seduce her, you are offering her another chance to roam emotionally with you.

Think of a good saleman’s frame when closing a customer. He isn’t asking for what he wants, he’s giving the customers what they want, which causes them to give him what he wants ($$$) in return. And what they want is not just whatever product is at hand; it’s the sense of comfort and security that life is going to be better, that they have something new in their life to feel good about. That’s where you’re going with “let’s continue this conversation later,” a little piece of hope that she has something exciting and original to look forward to amid all the herbs and betas trying to supplicate their way into her pants.

One final thing for night game: once you’ve locked up the number, excuse yourself politely and tell her “it was nice talking to you.” Then turn your body, face the door, and as you begin to walk away, give her a smack on the tail on the way out. That will get her tingling, introduce rapid-fire contrast game, and most importantly, she can’t shit test you about the escalation because you’re already gone.

Field Guide: Don’t Ask A Lot Of Direct Questions and Don’t Talk About Work

When I was in graduate school I began to be subjected to work as a core conversational topic. What department you were in, what research you were doing and when you planned to finish became regular banter topics. This pattern was actually an unwitting form of systematic humiliation; almost no graduate student finishes as quickly as they like nor are as pleased with the content of their work as they hoped. I sum it up with a strip from PhD Comics:

In school this game took on a sort of existential purpose, filling the space of polite discussion but at the same time lacking any significant meaning. None of us were all that concerned with other people’s work, and with the rampant impostor syndrome infecting our subculture, we didn’t want to face our own work either. It was a bit like the joke that “in Communism we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” Put more simply, it also meant that we had run out of genuinely interesting things to talk about.

It was a perverse sort of prisoner’s dilemma, we all had an incentive to confederate in propping up what bit of meaning the system could provide us, and you couldn’t afford to defect unless you were guaranteed to compensate for the loss of social cachet (in effect, the only option was leaving school entirely where your collegial social value no longer mattered); meanwhile you along with everyone else knew everybody was doing it wrong.

When I left grad school and entered the working world, I was disappointed to find that the “what do you do” question had taken on a whole new level of conversational meaning in afternoon happy hours and genteel dinner parties. It was no longer a mutual backscratching, a collective acquiescence to the shared ennui; rather it was more likely a passive aggressive invitation to show your cards early, laced with the air of cutthroat competition and status jockeying, of subtle plays to one’s superior income or “juice” (social proximity to important figures).

Fortunately, when still in school I had formulated a simple personal policy to deal with the situation: don’t talk about work. It was very simple and easy to implement; once on a ride to a picnic with a student group, another student turned to me and opened conversation with “so what are you doing for your research?” I told him on the spot that I was sorry but I had to go to sleep, and instantly napped it up with my head against the window.

DON’T TALK ABOUT WORK

When you’re out meeting people or flexing your game against the ladies about town, work discussions are a sure way to get put in the “cubicle drone” box instead of the “mysterious dashing fellow” box.

If someone drops in the “so what do you do,” they’ve probably run out of interesting things to talk about and have decided to play a beta-bait “let’s get to know each other” script. However, don’t sleep on the other, more nefarious purpose of interrogating you about your work: to investigate your social status and probable income. You can see where I’m going with this, that with what seems like an innocent question, a crafty woman might be asking you to save her the effort by disqualifying yourself from her potential mating pool.

Fortunately, you don’t have to assume the worst to motivate yourself to find other conversation topics. You just have to realize that talking about work is boring, and lends itself to an encyclopedic discourse that is either value-neutral or negative.

Besides, you shouldn’t want to discuss it at length; if you’ve been doing it right, you work your workday so you can go home and enjoy yourself, unburdened by the stresses of the day until you come back to the office in the morning.

In the same way that you avoid paying for women’s dinners by not going on dinner dates, the key factor here is to, quite simply, not talk about work. This can be easier said than done, and when you find someone who is REALLY concerned about what you “do,” you’ve got someone you’re better off walking away from. If it’s a deep concern of hers on the first meeting, you can be damn sure that you’ll be subjected to an unbroken sequence of lifestyle fitness testing and status pressures throughout the life of whatever relationship is possible with someone with that kind of either rocket-powered hypergamy or (conversely) strictly work-based life values.

Anyway, the best way to deal with this question is to treat it like a fitness test, and respond innocently with an answer so ridiculous and over-the-top they can’t help but tingle.

Give them a bullshit job title and description. Remain in character as long as possible. Options to riff on include:

• You’re an agent in a semipro midget football league (talk about how hard it is to find enough talented players to fill rosters)
• You’re in a Gordon Lightfoot cover band (talk about the difficulty of maintaining authenticity over decades of changing vocals and styles)
• You’re a security consultant for Wolfgang Puck restaurants (discuss the challenges of keeping the recipes safe from wannabe-Slugworths who slip into the kitchen offices on the way to the bathroom)
• You were involved in constructing the world’s largest guitar (“luckily we found someone who could play it, but on condition of absolute secrecy”)

You want to channel Owen Wilson’s dinner speech in Wedding Crashers where he convinces Christopher Walken and the rest of the well-to-do hosts that he and Vince Vaughan operated a charity where homeless people spun yarn into thread for other homeless people to make marketable garments out of.

(Notice the fitness-test trap question: “so is it just about the money?” Also does anybody else think this scene was ab libbed?)

If bold mendacity doesn’t get people off the scent, provide a concise, unapologetic description of your work, without expecting anyone to be impressed by it, and then change the subject. You don’t want to get on the topic long enough for people to ask follow up questions or to start poking fun at you and put you on the defensive.

Notice that I haven’t said anything about whether your job is cool or not. That’s because it’s immaterial to whether you should talk about it or not. If your job is menial, boring or low-status (let’s not kid ourselves; most jobs, even well-paying ones, are at least one of these), you definitely don’t want to lay that out in social company. In close friend groups or more intimate moments, sure. But even if your job is cool, you don’t want to lead with high status and value first. You can cultivate a mysterious edge and be different, the guy who DOESN’T want to talk about his job; and then when people find out you really are a badass, the effects of the understatement will ripple through the group like a shockwave.

DON’T ASK DIRECT QUESTIONS

Going again in the direction of providing the emotional adventure: you don’t want to get in the position of being asked interrogative questions (see above), and you certainly don’t want to be the one asking said questions. Nothing can dry up somebody’s social juices like the feeling she’s on the spot.

Here are some questions that can get you started. (I keep a few of these phrases ready in my mental pocket in case the conversation lags and I need to jump-start it.)

• When did you last sing to yourself?
• Is there something that you’ve dreamed of doing for a long time? Why haven’t you done it?
• Do you have a secret hunch about how you will die?

My high school English teacher was all about “assertions” in our essays. “Don’t just write facts down on the page, make assertions, and use facts to support them!” She taught me, after much roughness, how to stick to a point and make the argument not just in the topic sentence or the thesis statement but in every phrase in the work.

Likewise, you don’t want to be in a “conversation” that is like a mutual information drop. Instead you want to be leading someone through your affective assertions, with soft leading questions instead of direct pointed ones. Don’t stay on one topic too long, and don’t apologize for changing the subject. Factual exchange is not the aim (nor is coming out right in an argument), it’s the opening of interpersonal boundaries - using little nuggets of her own personality as anchors, as markers on the path through a vibrant, sensual trail.

As Roissy has said:

You are ROAMING all over, taking her on an adventure. In this world, there is no need to finish thoughts or draw conclusions. There is only need to EXPERIENCE. You’re grabbing her hand and running with her down an infinite, labyrinthine alleyway with no end, laughing and letting your fingers glide on the cobblestone walls along the way.

When you can make her feel something, the piddly details of your job or what neighborhood you live in fade to the background – you occupy a pole position in giving her that most distinctive experience, an emotional rush.

Bad Game Is Really Difficult To Watch

For most guys, it’s tough to watch another guy get rejected. It’s another matter, however, to come to an advanced understanding of game and thus be able to predict epic disasters on sight, and have to live through powerlessly watching the trainwreck.

It’s a bit like when I saw “Apollo 13,” and despite knowing no real details of the mission, I knew there was going to be a disaster somewhere. Thus the opening of the film was forty-five hellish minutes in which I tried to ignore the general tone of glee and waited for the other shoe to drop. Once the oxygen tanks blew off the side of the spacecraft, I relaxed, able to finally enjoy the sci-fact thriller I knew I had lined up to see.

I got that same feeling of nauseous anticipation when I saw “Alpha Male vs Beta Male,” a short clip commissioned by Roosh illustrating the contrast of chumpism and game. In each clip I knew the beta male was going to humiliate himself. It was all I could do to keep from covering my eyes.

The same feeling happens to me at a bar when an inveterate beta is at the next stool in vicinity of a lady, or when I see a pair on an obviously awkward “date” at the next table in a restaurant. Bad game is really difficult to watch for a number of reasons, one being that it reminds me of a bygone era of my own abject failures and not the least of which being that bad game is largely avoidable and preventable.

It is fun and interesting to hear Roosh’s exact lines from his book “Bang” said out loud by a guy on camera.

A Dating Disaster Diagnosed

Over the weekend Moxie advised a man who had been milked for a free night out. His story reads like an advertisement for a course in dating logistics.

“Met a girl online and we exchanged a few emails and phone calls and set up the date. Since I recently moved to her area, I suggested we go to a Houlihans or TGIFridays for drinks since I didnt know any other places. Besides, I was familiar with those establishments atmosphere wise and price wise. She then said she preferred a wine bar she frequently goes to instead. I agreed.

We each had 2 glasses of wine (way more expensive than Houlihans or Fridays) and after 2 hours she said she had to leave. The conversation up to that point I thought went very well and there was even some minor shoulder touching when we spoke. SO at that point I knew I enjoyed it more than her. When the bill came, she didnt offer to pay but did say thanks.

When I walked her to her car, I got the cheek kiss and a hug. At that point it was obvious she wasnt interested and we parted. The next day she sends me an email saying I was sweet but not right for each other.

Now the questions. Since she didnt feel anything, should she have stopped after the first glass of wine and maybe had water or soda instead? If she did order the second glass, should she have at least offered to pay when the bill came? This bugs me because she upped the ante on my original suggestion to a more upscale place from Houlihans to that wine bar. Had the same scenario played out in my original offer, it would have cost far less.

I feel like she was in a win-win situation. She gets a potential connection or else a free night at an upscale place. She says she dates frequently and has been on all the dating sites for years (she told me this in person on the date). Sounds to me like she knew exactly what she was doing. Am I being too sensitive about this? At least I found out about a cool new place for any future second or third dates with another girl.”

This case provides a useful roadmap for correcting a number of all-too-typical dating foibles. I’m going to start at the end and work backwards, tracing points at which he could have improved his outcome.

When the bill came. By the time the check came, you had a feeling you enjoyed it more than her. That means the likelihood of a second date or even some escalation on the first date was slim. So you should have asked to split the check, cut your losses and moved on. There’s no sense in making an investment towards future goodwill that you’re never going to collect on. If she protests, remind her that the wine bar was her idea, that she wanted to go there. Should she have offered to pay her share knowing there wasn’t going to be a second encounter? The question contains a false premise – she should have offered to pay her part of the tab regardless.

I can hear the criticism now – “but that’s so rude to ask her to pay! Women don’t like that, it’s not claaaaassy.” OK, so what? A woman who wants to see you again will be popping out of her skin, it’s just not that difficult to tell. If she’s not giving off those signals, then you have nothing to lose except the cost of entertaining a woman who has no interest in seeing you again. I accept a small financial outlay as a skid-greaser towards later dating experiences with a woman (where I expect the investment to even out one way or another). If it’s clear there’s no later experience coming, I’m no longer interested in such generosity.

Guys get into this mindset where they think they’ll dispatch a bad date by ponying up cash just to make it go away. I’ve been there, you just want to get out of there so you get the bill covered as quickly as you can, have an awkward side-hug and go home. But that just perpetuates the modus operandi that it’s the man’s job to sing and dance and the woman’s job to judge the performance.

When she insisted you change the plan. There’s a certain tackiness to being asked out and then requesting that the location be changed to better suit your tastes – trying to upgrade an invitation is a harbinger of flakiness and perpetual dissatisfaction. (If she really used the word “prefer,” that’s pushy and entitled language, as if her desires alone should carry the day.) There’s also a small fitness-test aspect to it, in that you’ll lose points if you fold and she perceives you don’t have any confidence in your original plan. But the bigger issue is that it sets up a frame of reference in which she is in the driver’s seat to insist on being entertained, where she’s dating not to get to know you but to have fun on someone else’s effort, and that’s not a frame in which you are likely to come off as attractive or desireable.

The thing is that you DO need to make the date fun for her, but you need to be inviting her into your life, not acting as her cruise director - so if she insists on dictating the terms of the engagement, you should probably invoke the abundance mentality and back away from the deal entirely. As Moxie said:

I don’t think you gals understand….these guys don’t have to go out with you. They likely have plenty of other options.

Choice of location. Now, in her post Moxie went off on this guy as “cheap,” and she throws in snarky references to Olive Garden and Dave & Buster’s just to rub it in his face.

I don’t think that’s exactly the point, and quite frankly I find girls are way too hung up on “cheap” as if money grows on trees for the express purpose of being plucked by men and subsequently delivered to women. Especially for today’s economy when frugality should be a personal virtue of everybody (don’t let your desire for women shame you out of watching your dollars).

The point is that the perception of Friday’s and Houlihan’s is of places you go when you are on a budget and don’t have anywhere better to go. (What’s interesting is that they themselves are chain knockoffs of Fern Bars, highly distinctive yuppie hangouts of the 1980′s.)  And besides, she’s been there before, not to that particular restaurant but to that kind of generic, anonymous place. It’s unclear if he actually told her he “didn’t know any other places,” but in any case his suggestions communicate a lack of knowledge, imagination, or both. One of the benefits of dating in a new area is that it will (or should) get you acquainted with all sorts of vibey places for dessert, ice cream, and unusual beers or cocktails. Browse Yelp and Urbanspoon, and subscribe to a couple of local food blogs. Admittedly, this gets tough if you’re dating in the suburbs and don’t have a lot of mom-and-pop options or places that cater to young adults. Make it work however you can though, a little uniqueness game goes a long way. You can find a lot of places that are just as inexpensive as a midlevel chain but are much better experiences. Think like a hipster.

Incidentally, you’ll want to read Moxie’s thread for the harsh invective from women (including Moxie herself) about how “cheap” and “clueless” the guy was. OMG, can you believe he tried to take her to a chain restaurant?! This kind of shallow status consciousness is unfortunately typical in large sectors of the dating world. Since we have to assume and plan around this sort of bear trap, no woman should get any first-date presumption of being girlfriend material; every woman you date has to start out on Ladder 2, with an option to move to Ladder 1 if she earns (proves) it.

NO DINNER DATES

This date didn’t involve dinner per se, but this is a good time to talk about them anyway. The bottom line: don’t do them, at least not with women you haven’t slept with yet.

I don’t know when or how “dinner dates” became cultural de rigeuer for early dating, but they are a total non-starter in today’s climate. Early dinner dates involve too much sitting down chatting and not enough action, excessive investment of time and money, too little opportunity for kino escalation and put too much pressure on the opening encounters. It’s probably the most effective way to put your provider foot forward and thus get instantly moved into the Boyfriend Zone or worse yet the Beta Orbiter Zone.

For a man who has broken out of blue-pill betatude, it’s difficult to understand the degree to which other men’s minds are stuck in failing dating patterns to the point they can’t imagine anything else. I was approached by a friend recently who asked how to avoid paying for a woman’s dinner on a date. “Don’t go to dinner on the date,” I replied plainly. He was momentarily astounded – the concept of breaking out of the dinner-date script had not entered his mind.

“CHEAP DATES”

As an aside, I have long found it interesting to hear women describe themselves as “cheap dates” – the assumption is that it’s the man’s job to wine and dine her, and that she’s somehow doing him a favor by lowering her level of expectations and saving him some money and trouble.

I used to be really heated up about this topic, but I’ve hit a streak lately of dating women who are very low on the dating-entitlement factor, who offer to pay half (not as a shit test) and are more concerned about my company than where I’m taking them. Part of it is me projecting a frame that is not confused with a wine-and-diner, but another part is plain good luck. Either way it’s been very refreshing.

LESSONS LEARNED

This dude, after telegraphing that he wasn’t on top of his dating game, allowed himself to be bullied into switching the meeting place and then got stuck with the tab for a woman that wasn’t into him. Whether this was all a ruse just so she could get an evening at her chosen wine bar, or if she lost nascent attraction and got what she could on her way out of the arrangement, is unimportant; his moves alone all but determined she wasn’t going to be interested in him by the end of the night. The solution: own the plan, go to a place that is distinctive but where you don’t have to spend a lot of money, and don’t stay in one place too long while the bill climbs and the energy declines.

Learn To Take A Compliment With Pride

One of the self-destructive patterns that beta males are socialized into is polite modesty. Men are taught to be gracious and self-effacing, to back away from it to avoid appearing arrogant or overconfident.

I’ve noticed an overall trend of knee-jerk deference among the educated communities in which I run – more than once I have complimented someone on their cooking, only to have them sheepishly accept it before immediately noting something that they think is substandard (“I overdid it a little,” “I didn’t have enough curry powder” or whatever). It’s like the onus is on them to show they aren’t full of themselves, so they’re not allowed to take praise in stride. Frankly, it’s a very feminized way of communicating, maintaining through loaded communication the illusion of social equality. These people need to learn the first rule of public interaction: never interrupt someone who is complimenting you.

There’s a degree to which this game is actually insulting to the complimenter – by contradicting my compliment, you’re telling me I lack good taste and judgment. Someone is trying to put you in a frame of power and prestige, and you refuse it? A beta move for sure. If you do this to, say, your boss, you undermine your boss’ image of you as confident and capable. If you do it to your boss in front of other people, you make the both of you look bad (you as unable to assume the authority you’ve been given, the boss as a poor judge of talent).

For guys, this false moedsty ties into the cultural conditioning of “because you’re male, you have all this privilege and power so you need to bend over backwards to not abuse it.” Which is bogus if you’re a beta male. Still other guys, I think, are deeply appreciative of being praised rather than criticized and take it as a license to go vulnerable, spewing out their perceived faults in what they think is a judgment-free environment.

Anyway, it’s really easy to take a compliment:

• Don’t deny it – a lack of confidence in qualities others are recognizing in you is a mark of bad frame or pathological low self-esteem. This is not just a tingle-killer, it’s a bad way to go about life.
• Don’t get overexcited – being hooked on the praise and approval of others is first-order neediness and irritating to everyone

When you receive a compliment (especially from a woman) your response should be really simple: be cool. You want to act as if whatever people are praising is self-evident. You can do this in a number of ways.

Sincere: “Thank you, I really appreciate that.”

Non-plussed: “All in a day’s work.”

Teasing: “Oh listen to you buttering me up!”

PHYSICAL COMPLIMENTS ARE EVIDENCE OF TINGLE

When a woman gives a man a direct compliment about his physical appearance or sensual presentation, that’s her body agenda talking straight out of her mouth. Of late, I’ve received several well-placed compliments on my natural scent. Being the game-aware gentleman that I am, I recognized it as a strong indicator of interest with an option clause for escalation, and played accordingly.

Flyfreshandyoung had a recent post that covered this topic (emphasis mine):

Another potential problem I’ve been asked about from time to time is-

“What do I do if a girl tells me I’m hot/cute/sexy/etc…”

Yeah, yeah, cry me fucking river, right? But seriously, this can be a pitfall for dudes who don’t experience this regularly, because while this isn’t a shit test or anything like that you can still lose points with a dumb response. Downplaying it, getting excited, or being self effacing will get you nowhere.

Whenever a girl tells me I’m hot, I do one of two things-

If she is looking standard-issue interested (90% of the time), I look her in the eye, smile, and say thank you. And then I go back to whatever I was talking about with her, or if that was her opener, I ask her her name.

If she looks really nervous like it took her a lot of courage to say that, I shrug and smirk, telling her she doesn’t look too bad herself. I’ve found it helps put her at ease and stops her from clamming up or thinking I’m too far out of her league.

She’s giving you an open lane – are you going to take it? Are you man enough to take it? A lot of guys aren’t. A winner doesn’t apologize for his quality.

Body Language: The Beer Shield

Last year my blogging compatriot Gmac had a brilliant post on a body-language quirk he had noticed which is known as “the Beer Shield.”

The Beer Shield is a college-born social tactic that young men pick up in dive bars and house parties. It is a fallback technique akin to a security blanket that should be shamed out of men.

Keeping a beer close to your chest is a sign of insecurity. It’s no different from playing with your phone in a bar. It tells the other people around you, “Hey everyone! I’m awkward and have no idea what I’m supposed to be doing with myself right now!” It signals desperation and confusion to the opposite sex. More importantly, it’s counterproductive to an approach mentality.

Don’t believe me? The next time you’re out at a bar take a look around. The guys with their beer shields up won’t be talking to women, or if they are, it won’t be very long. Beer Shields make you less sociable while working against you. All they do is add yet another barrier between you and the rest of the women in the room (that’s not even including bitch shields).

Relax, set the drink down. Hold it to the side or below your waist if you like. Dangle your bottle or use it as a prop as you speak. Be nonchalant and carefree. There’s nothing interesting or cool about a guy who raises and lowers a beer in front of his face like a monkey.

I commented on Gmac’s post about my own field experience:

Was out with another game-aware dude last week and noticed a guy using the beer shield. He drank the entire glass and still used the empty as a shield, then when posing for a picture with some chicks he came in with, he held the glass in his hand when he put his arm around a girl. It was like using a prop to effect hover hands. I wanted to impersonate a waiter and take it away from him.

It’s simple open body language. This video makes the additional point that holding the drink in front of your chest requires muscular tension that puts you in a less relaxed mode.

In addition to eliminating any beer-shield behavior in my own person (and experiencing a detectable boost in my own social comfort), since reading this post I’ve come to notice beer-shielding among young people in my cohort, and found that Gmac is right – guys holding their drinks at their sides, or placing them on the bar so as to talk with both hands, are more sociable, more open and more alpha.

I also noticed a collateral sequela of holding the drink down. Holding the drink at your side requires that you hold it by the lip of the glass instead of the base. This means that when you bring it up to your mouth, you are forced to sip it rather than gulp it. It also hides part of your face for some cheap mystery points. When you are holding your drink from the bottom, your instinct is to turn it over and flood the contents into your mouth. You don’t want to do this; it looks gluttonous and out of control.

It’s all part of doing things slowly and deliberately – you’re not there to pound the drink, it’s just an incidental part of your evening.

YOU DON’T NEED BOOZE

While we’re on the topic, you should consider whether you want to drink at all. I’m no teetotaler and I’m not trying to talk anybody out of it, but alcohol affects your health, raises your reaction times, and can get you into trouble when driving or dealing with authority. (The peripatetic blogger Assanova claimed drinking gave him bouts of unpredictable and itinerant depression.)

I personally know two very successful game-aware men who don’t drink at all.

If you want to drink alcohol, drink because you enjoy it, not because it’s there or because you want to fit in with the rest of the circle. I love having interesting cocktails and craft beers, but if someone offers me a Natty Light I say no (I do sometimes offer to piss in a glass and sell it to them for three dollars). Sure it takes some self-identity to pass up a beverage everyone else is having, but isn’t that what game is really all about?

It’s not hard to do. When someone asks to get you a drink, say, “nah, I’m fine, thanks.” Don’t explain. Once you say that a few times, word gets around that drinking isn’t your thing.

IT’S THE LITTLE THINGS

A while back on a thread in the Roosh V Forum, some guy was poo-poohing the beer-shield advice. His “point” was along the lines of:

“So some woman is going to want to do me because I hold my drink a certain way? That’s so ridiculous, gamers are such loosers lolz!”

The answer is, yes and no. No particular subtle point of body language is going to turn you from a chumparrific fap king into a budding Casanova. But it’s a piece of the puzzle, and if you spend a lot of time drinking with others, how you hold your drink is going to go a long way towards how their hindbrains see your social value.

It’s also a question of optimization. If your body language and mental composure are generally free and open, there’s no need to occupy your mind with small details. But if your game sucks, you need to understand that seemingly-small problems can have a big impact on reinforcing how people already see you, because you don’t have an overall positive, attractive frame in which to operate. This is especially true with women, who are subconsciously and consciously judging you on subtle factors that escape most guys’ concern.

It’s this small-details-to-big-picture development model that so many game haters miss – the way you learn any kind of skill or attitude is to start with specific intentional behaviors, and as those become rote and unconscious you develop a holistic mindset that makes the specific behaviors flow from that mindset.

People who say “just be confident/be calm/have inner game/etc and everything will flow from there” have it backwards. That’s really a self-affirmation based in wishful fiction rather than in reproducible fact. It’s just not an effective way to make changes in your psyche.

How And Why Men Are Taught Wrong on Decoding A Woman’s Interest

Candide left a very interesting comment on my last post challenging conventional wisdom on clueless men and cryptic women.

TBH I don’t buy this guys are so thick and girls are crap at showing interest. Years ago, when I first found Game, one of the first lessons I was taught was that women with high interest will make it obvious and easy for you. Girls who show vague / unclear interest are not the ones who have high interest in you. All this head-slapping, facepalming moments afterwards when they told you how they were keen but you didn’t notice are just bullshit from them to get your attention at a later date. I’ve heard that plenty of times from girls, never bought it. Maybe it’s because I’ve seen how seemingly shy introverted girls show very obvious interest in alphas and I’ve also been that guy who gets actively seduced by highly keen women. When they really like you, they don’t let you get away that easily!

Girls know how to get guys’ attention. They’ve had practice for years. The girls who say they don’t are the unattractive and/or super awkward ones.

I fully concur with his sentiment – this subject is just not that hard, I have long pushed back on the “dumb men, crazy women” meme that rues the less-efficient corners of the sexual marketplace (inefficient being code for “people who aren’t getting the partners they want.”)

I do however think a few caveats and notes are in order. (In a shocker, Badger has some opinions on things.)

1a. Guys are “thick” in part because at least stateside, guys are taught that women are fundamentally demure and do not seek sex or sexual stimulation from men, and also that it’s the guy’s job to chase an uninterested woman until she decides she likes him after all (this lesson is pounded in by films, TV and bad dating advice from women). Situations that break this narrative – like girls blowing guys in the back of the schoolbus, or Girls Gone Wild behavior on the bar circuit – is blamed on evil alpha males who make them do it (in the same way that rampant hooking up is explained as “she’s just trying to get that high-status guy to be her boyfriend.”) It is also noticeable that the more sexually “free” a subculture is, the more women focus their sexual attentions on top men, so it’s a paradox that the more men see female sexuality for what it is (e.g. on the covers of Cosmo), the fewer men they see it expressed with (i.e. usually not them).

1b. Most (~75% of) guys have such uniformly bad and difficult experiences with women in their youth that they are predisposed to disbelieve that a truly interested woman is actually interested.

We humans tend to internalize bad outcomes more strongly than good ones (I’ve heard a ratio of 3:1 or even 5:1) so even a couple of bad experiences with a woman who was teasing him or blew him out can cause a guy to acquire a Pavlovian response and stop reading signals correctly.

The loss of a formalized dating culture, which both banded people with their SMV peers and taught them the rudiments of escalation and the bounds of investment, has been a disaster for men of less-than-top status, as they are really fighting for scraps in the SMP playground and are given very few tools to display value and assert themselves.

This even goes, believe it or not, for some alpha/player types – washed as they are in female attention (which to them is mostly fungible and replaceable), they never HAD to develop the skills to attract, pursue and seduce a particular target. And so when they meet a woman they are really hot for in all ways, they might be no better than a oneitis-laden beta boy. This doesn’t happen nearly as much as romcoms make women believe it does, but I have seen it more than once.

Put another way, the beta male doesn’t understand IOIs and so doesn’t know when to make his move (or bail entirely). Thing is, the guy with the alpha-male attitude usually doesn’t really care whether a woman is all that interested, he’ll make his bold move either way and if she’s not down, he’ll move on without a blink. So he doesn’t have to bother to learn an in depth evaluation of a woman’s interest.

2. Girls know how to get guys’ attention, yes, but they also know how to frame it in a plausibly-deniable way, so if the guy doesn’t approach, or his approach goes bad, she can default to a “oh, oops, you thought I was interested in you? Sorry” routine. This also helps deflect criticism from other women who might accuse her of being “too forward,” another way of complaining that she might be undercutting the SMP cartel (despite the hand-wringing of patriarchy-obsessed feminist scholars, most slut-shaming comes from other women).

So the end result is that young men have very little good data, because women can deny (or withdraw) having been interested in a guy, because they don’t want to admit to themselves or others that they were interested in a guy who either had bad game or rejected them. My experience is that women take rejection very poorly, so it’s often the case that she will ramp up that rationalization hamster to convince others or even herself that she wasn’t really interested. I think there’s an old fable about that.

I don’t think this is really a nefarious tactic, it’s just semi-subconscious ego protection. It happens, however, to have a corrosive effect on the development of a healthy and constructive male sexuality, replacing it with repression and frustration and strong distrust of women (see 1b above). In contrast to haters who say game teaches men to use and objectify women, teaching men to recognize and go around the subterfuge is a huge part of getting men to actually enjoy being around women (hat tip to Dogsquat for developing out my thoughts).

I started thinking about this a lot when corresponding with a female reader who told me some anecdotes of her friends going well out of their way to deny that they were interested in a particular guy – like they were all in some intra-gender competition to see who was least interested and emotionally invested in sex, relationships and basic male attention. Whether that’s some “I don’t need a man’ feminism talking, or just protecting their pride that they couldn’t get some guy they really wanted, I’ll never know. Probably some of both.

Discussion of the plausible-deniability angle took place live on this high-intensity post (link to Mike C’s perceptive comment).

As a coda, I do concur with Candide that women who have difficulty actively cultivating attention from men are at a major disadvantage, just as are men who lack good attraction skills, and they need to learn some girl game. Those girls who “always have a boyfriend” are doing something to get it, and it’s a lot more than just looking good. The issue for most men is getting on women’s radar screens at all (i.e. attraction) – while for women, it’s getting the right guys to approach.

When You Work Your Passive Game, Detecting Female Interest Becomes A Sensitive and Intuitive Skill

Following up my previous post on passive game, as I became more aware of the signs of female attraction, I eventually grew to intuitively sense the aura and spirit of a woman’s interest, without needing to codify the signals in an analytical manner. Now that I am both highly aware and frequently approaching in the wild, I am constantly on the subconscious lookout for approachable women to talk to – and so I have developed a heightened radar sense for when an interested woman is in the vicinity.

In effect, I had trained myself into the perceptive ability that naturals have, well, naturally. What I could previously only sense through blindingly obvious signals like a woman’s big smile or tossing her hair back in my presence, I can now pick up in the subtlest of cues – so fleeting that it’s sometimes nothing more than our little secret. It’s in the momentary glances of interest, undressing me with her eyes, straight-up eye fu**ing, and longing, desperate gazes that verily scream “please come talk to me, so I can bathe in your masculine energy.” Gone were the days of regular “I had no idea she was interested in me!” facepalms, replaced with calculated, well-managed risks of the Yohami-esque “she seems interested in me, maybe I should find out if she’s cool” persuasion.

This manifested just recently as I was exiting the train. As I looked back to fiddle with my bag I made the briefest of eye contact with a young woman behind me. She smiled at me and chuckled, with that vaguely embarrassed look of someone who’s just been caught peeping. On the way off the platform I walk slowly in case she wants to catch up; she pulls up alongside me and I deliver my opener. Just as I knew, she was perfectly willing to talk to me.

In another case, I was out with some friends for drinks and as I moved to and from the bar, I passed by a pretty young lady who was deploying several ways to get my attention. Stealing glances at me disguised as aimless stares while listening to her friends talk, allowing the back of her hand to brush against me as I squeezed past her, and as I was waiting for my order to be garnished, carressing my shoulder with the point of her middle finger.

In an earlier time I might have recoiled, assuming she had touched me by mistake and even apologizing for being in her way. No more; I filed it in the “open her” category. (I was actually working another prospect at the time, and by the time I was free to open her, she had begun talking with a male member of her group who acted as a non-competitive inhibitor: not an object of her interest, but occupying her attention just the same.)

Pre-verbal interest requires something to be attracted to, and as I stand up straight and move with deliberateness, I display value as a “dominant” man simply in the way that I move, without having to actually dominate anybody. This invites the nonverbal admiration of those who like that in a man and thus they invite me to invite them into my world.

Passive Game

When Neil Strauss’ iconic book “The Game” was released in 2005, it made big waves among communities of young men, and my social circle was no exception.

I had a friend at the time who was a real natural. He was very insecure about his 5’8″ stature, but other than that, a real charmer – physically fit, basically nice and magnanimous with good cooking and entertainment skills, and a smart guy with a good work ethic that tripped the educated girls’ switches. He was not socially dominant as much as he was always doing interesting things that made people want to be around him. All the women in our group were crushing on him bigtime.

We were all having a beer one afternoon when he remarked on this book he had read about in the paper, about a bunch of guys who had developed and drilled systematic methods of attracting women.

At the time I had a very dim awareness of the book’s release. We discussed some of the rudimentary basics, especially the more sensational ones – complicated openers, negs (neutral-value statements), ignoring the woman you are interested in in favor of courting the approval of her friends, fighting off competitors (AMOGs).

Surprisingly, the girls were mum on the whole thing – a calm before the apoplectic storm that would wash over the so-called seduction community and the mainstream world of young single men. Maybe it was the fact that our group was all STEM girls with a bent toward the analytical, or maybe it was the fact that they were all relatively poor performers in the SMP, and so they secretly wished someone would run some game on them.

I found the whole idea interesting, but although I refrained from any moralistic judgments I didn’t really think it was for me. This was a combination of:

• Beta insecurity (going into the game would be admitting my own failure with women to date)
• Interest in other things than getting girls (I hadn’t the urgency of the situation I developed later. I didn’t yet recognize the apparent paradox that even though I was very relationship-oriented I still stood to benefit from generalized pickup and game skills)
• A complete lack of desire to run club/bar game – even if I could kill in those environments with some practice, I didn’t want to because I found them and the women I had already met in them excruciating boring.

It wasn’t until years later, after one of the women in that group had broken my heart (as a matter of fact I let her break my heart twice) that I actually read “The Game” and started my red-pill journey that has brought us all here together on these pages.

PASSIVE GAME

There was one part of the whole setup that immediately appealed to me, and that is the skill to acutely read a woman’s signals, the subtext of her communication, and her willingness to entertain your further advances, and to make go/no-go decisions on the fly based on that information.

I’ve come to call it “passive game” because it doesn’t require that a guy change his own core behavior in any way, and it’s the first thing I demonstrate to any guy new to the scene:

• Read indicators of interest
• Don’t blow your opportunity cost
• Read fake closes

You don’t have to buy new clothes, learn any routines, or alter your body language. You can be more successful with women, significantly, by doing these things.

READ INDICATORS OF INTEREST

All the advice I had received to that point was along the Cosmo-esque lines of trying to divine a woman’s interest in me by reading a score of obscure “does she seem to like you” tea leaves paired with a healthy dose of undeveloped intuition, and the foolish courage to “take a chance” which was really a blind shot in the dark.

I was floored by the elucidation of subconscious, subrational Indicators of Interest (IOIs) that provided subtle but reliable cues to her attraction and were far less fakeable and confusable than what women themselves told me they did when interested in a man (this was before I’d decide to ignore that advice).

For review, some of the basic IOIs are: fiddling with her hair, clothes, skin, or accessories, touching you, asking you personal questions, asking your name, opening her body language, allowing you into her personal space or invading yours, laughing at things that aren’t all that funny, slapping your arm in response to a tease, staying with you when her entourage leaves the area and finally what Strauss and Mystery called “the doggy-dinner-bowl look” – a visage of captivation, hanging on your next move and desperately wanting to be included in your frame.

This passive-game growth process starts with checking off each item in your head, and as you do more approaches (and observe those of other men) the knowledge subsumes into your intuition and you can just get a feel for if a woman is interested without having to count how many times she touched her wrist or asked you a question.

(One critical caveat: calibrate your expectations for venue and personality. Expect fewer IOIs in a daygame environment, more IOIs at night or in well-oiled environs, and unwittingly fake IOIs from certain people who are just demonstrative and physical in their personal style. Italian and Irish women have been known to touch everybody all the time without meaning anything by it. On the other hand, a relatively quiet or non-outgoing woman who is really into you will probably throw a 4th of July display of IOIs for you compared to her response to an average suitor.)

I immediately realized that good, sound, reliable knowledge of IOIs was a huge step forward – allowing me to dial my own investment in the conversation up or down as needed to mirror her vibe, and ultimately allowing me to make an informed, low-risk decision as to whether to go for the close or just give up the set. Which brings me to…

DON’T BLOW OPPORTUNITY COST

Opportunity cost is the observation that when you do (or purchase) one thing, you’ve consumed time and resources that could have been used on something else. In this context, opportunity cost means time and social energy you wasted on a poor prospect that you could have spent talking to a woman who was interested in you, OR time and energy spent beyond the point a woman signalled that she was not interested in you (after which it’s better to do nothing by yourself than to keep talking to her).

In addition to time and effort, you’ve induced some heartache in yourself by investing emotionally in someone who’s not likely to invest in you back. It’s one of the harder things in the game to execute, as we beta types have been raised all our lives with rom-com chick-flick archetypes filling our heads that it’s the man’s job to prove himself to the woman and to keep pursuing until she comes to her sense and realizes what a perfect match he is for her.

But it’s something you have to do, just cut it loose and forget about her. There’s an important preselection consequence here: women can tell when another woman is not interested, and so every minute you spend talking to someone who’s not interested costs you points with everyone watching. You look more and more like a guy with poor social skills who can’t take a hint, and it will poison your rep for the rest of the night.

By the same token, if a woman is really responding to you, you want to increase the intensity of the conversation and go for the insta-date or get her number before you leave. One of the benefits of correctly reading a woman’s positive interest is that your game doesn’t have to be all that tight, you just have to move things along and leave her wanting more. It’s a good investment to maintain an approach if the woman is clearly interested, and to push for another meeting.

Speaking of next meetings…

READ FAKE CLOSES

Women are famous for indirectness and subterfuge in their communication; it has been a source of endless frustration for men over the thousands of years of human history. One aspect of this is “letting him down easy,” a phenomenon I call the “fake close.” Put simply, she gives her number but doesn’t really plan on responding when you call or text (perhaps she just wants to get rid of you). Or she touches/gropes/kisses you, but was really just looking for some quick validation or a good time that night. It’s another red-pill lesson to swallow that not all women are desperately waiting for Prince Charming to walk in the door and sweep her off her feet. Sometimes she’ll take a nice bout of conversation, or a good kiss, and leave it at that.

If she wants to see you again, numbers will come spilling out of her mouth, or she’ll enthusiastically take your phone and punch in her number and her name (and make sure to spell it right). Or even ask you what you’re doing later and try to isolate you herself. If she doesn’t want to see you again, she might pause before accepting your request with an “uh…sure.” Or not make eye contact when she’s spelling out her number in a droll tone. It seems women are loath to be direct unless they’re motivated enough to deliver a pyrotechnic rejection that aims to humiliate the guy.

(My advice to women on this point: be direct, but unemotional. Men generally want to take criticism without a chaser so there’s nothing to be gained sugarcoating it except a false sense of esteem that you’re a nice person for kissing his butt while rejecting him. A bunch of fake smiles and tones of perfunctory flattery, “you seem like a really nice guy, but…” are just going to make it harder to swallow.)

Keep your expectations reasonable – you won’t see a good number of your number closes ever again – and learn to pick up signs that she’s BSing you on the way out the door. Try not to take it personally; give her an ounce of credit for a misplaced aim to spare your feelings and move on with the night. In fact, every time you close a woman, you should aim to open a new one, if only to get your mind off the first one for a little while.

USING PASSIVE GAME AS A DISPLAY OF HIGHER VALUE

As a coda, reading women can be used as a parlor trick of its own when talking to a woman. Most women I meet love people-watching, and an semi-accurate cold read of a nearby set can peg you as a goddamn psychic in her eyes.

This is core game stuff, and it’s not that hard to learn if a guy is persistent and observant. It’s easy to implement because it’s fundamentally indirect (hence the name passive game) and it really does pay off when you can tell within 30 seconds whether a woman is going to be worth your time.