Anyone who has tried game in more than one of its forms (day game, night game, online game, social circle game, etc.) are aware that day game offers a particularly low return on investment (ROI).
Although its proselytisers try to paint day game as a walk in the park (perhaps literally) where you don’t have to deal with drunkenness, cockblocks or AMOGs, the reality, as most men who have tried it will attest, is that it’s a grind. A grind to get phone number and then a grind to make anything meaningful happen as a result. Even some of the best players in the world report a conversion rate of only around 11%. Why is this the case, and what should you do to improve your odds?
The reason day game can provide little tangible benefit for hours of work is simple: it all comes down to lack of trust. In fact a lack of trust that is built into the day game model itself. Put simply, day game requires you to walk up to a woman you have never met before, in a totally random context, talk to her for a few moments, and hope to seduce her as a result. When put like this, is it any wonder that social circle and even night game tend to produce faster and more prolific results? The act of cold approach in the day time is socially unusual and a big ask for girls to go along with.
Conditions for Trust
This week I attended a talk by the British journalist and author Ian Leslie, who has written a number of books including Born Liars on the subject on lying in the ‘post-truth’ era. This was an advertising industry event, and Leslie was there to discuss the notion of trust as it pertains to brands marketing their goods and services. Put simply, trust in big corporations is at an all-time low right now. You only have to look at the respective reputations of Uber and Ryanair in the UK at the moment to see that.
Leslie wanted to talk to us about what he termed the necessary ‘conditions for trust’. These could apply to advertising, but equally to friendship, business, diplomacy between nations, and everything else in between. The conditions he named are:
- Time
- Consistency
- Ritual
What does this mean when we think about it from an interpersonal perspective. Well, if you spend a lot of time with someone, if they are consistent with you in terms of their contact, and indeed, if seeing them becomes a ritual for you then you are much more likely to feel truth in them than if any one of these conditions doesn’t apply.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is also true when we apply it to intergender dynamics. Some time ago I conducted an experiment where I completed 100 cold day game approaches in a month. At the same time I was also doing social circle and night game approaches too.
Thanks to this effort I succeeded in getting laid abundantly. But what was most interesting was that the girls I slept with were not, in the main, from the day game I undertook, even though this was where most of my efforts had gone. No, the girls I got into bed were largely from social circle and night game.
Why might this be? Hopefully it’s obvious if you’ve been following so far. The girls I met through social circle trusted me more because I met the three necessary conditions. I had naturally spent more time with them than the girls from day game. I was consistent in seeing them (for example, a couple were girls from work who I saw every day). And there was ritual involved in our meeting—for example, one of the girls I would meet for secret cups of coffee in the canteen every day at 4pm.
Trust is Super Important
In game we get so hung up on attraction, attraction, attraction that we tend to forget about trust (or comfort). I’m not talking here about trust in a blue-pill, hands-around-the-world, kumbaya-type way, but on a very base level she’s got to trust that you are a normal guy who isn’t going to turn psycho on her, or stalk her or whatever. And of course, that is far easier when you are someone she sees regularly.
This, as I’ve argued before, is the principal problem with day game—it’s often not grounded enough. It looks too player-ish and contrived. That’s why even when you get a phone number there’s a good chance it will flake. When she’s gone home and had time to think there’s every chance that she (or one of her friends) will revise her opinion on the value of meeting up with you.
Acceptance Prophecy
How to counter this? There are no easy answers. Am I saying, though, that you should avoid day game? No, not at all. I’ve done day game since the early 2000’s and I’ve got laid through it loads of times, so it can definitely work, but you must bear trust in mind when you go out. Yes, it’s fine to appear like frothy ‘player’ for the first few minutes. But after a time you really do need to pull back just a little, and act normally as well.
Another concept that might help with this that Leslie introduced us to was ‘the acceptance prophecy” (The Reign of Error, Stinson et al, 2009, ). The idea here is that there are social optimists and social pessimists, and that loneliness compounds. That being the case, if you are a social pessimist and you go out thinking that no one likes you then this is likely to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Alternatively if you decide that everyone is pleased to meet you then the opposite will occur.
On this basis, when you go out to meet girls through day game, always do so with the mindset that she will like you and welcome your approach. Simply doing that will make it more likely that you will get a positive reception and this will compound, building warmth and trust between the two of you. To push this further, it’s worth approaching each new girl as though you’d known her for years. If you refuse to accept the frame that you are ‘strangers meeting in an unusual way’ then she will feel more comfortable, and you are much more likely to generate that valuable trust that is so crucial for success.
For a compilation of all Troy’s best game writing, advice and techniques from the last four years buy his new book How To Get Hot Girls Into Bed.
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