Day 10

Saturday night was newbie night. A bunch of us met at a bar to get a short seminar on technique, and then headed to a club venue for in-field practice. It was a good opportunity to get to meet some of the guys whose names I had seen before but hadn't met - Stallion for one.

The biggest takeaway from the workshop is that inner game is key, and that you have to be assertive. You have to go in there knowing that you are the man. If you don't believe it, they won't either. You aren't going to fake your way in there. When you make kino, you have to be assertive and not half-assed (Warwick emphasized this later).

I also think that some of the things that they said are a bit too advanced for me at this point. For example, "don't talk about boring shit." My goal right now is to get better at opening and staying in sets, with a secondary goal of building attraction. Since I don't use anything canned with the exception of my openers (which I make up), I'm still learning about how to make a conversation flow. I need anything I can get, and if I don't talk about mundane stuff, I will run out of things to say within the first five minutes. If I can remember to SCRM, that should make things a lot easier (once I started using misinterpretation in sets, the girls started laughing and kinoing much more).

So we got to the venue, and I opened a set off the bat. It actually didn't go badly, although I ran out of things to say pretty quickly and eventually got blown out. For an opener, not bad. Then I opened another set, who didn't seem that into me and blew me out fairly quickly. I think that they had been opened about five times before I ever got there.

At that point, I ran into Warwick. He gave me some important pointers:

1) Don't talk to your friends
2) Go out there and open sets

Its too easy to form a "chode crystal," where guys with no game clump up together. This doesn't help anyone, unless you are into other guys.

He had me up in the front, attempting to open sets as they walked into the bar. The standing sets were ok. Some of them went well (girls having a birthday party, etc..), and some blew me out quickly. The hardest thing was opening moving sets as they entered the bar. Warwick gave me three important pieces of advice to help with that:

Touch, Eyes, Talk

First you establish contact with one of the girls. I would go for the first in the chain, because the last often can't resist the pull of her friends (its interesting how tightly girls clump together). They you wait until she makes eye contact with you. Finally, you deliver your opener. Even though my opener is pretty money, I think that I need a new opener for moving sets - I can't keep a group of girls stationary for 30 seconds while I get to the punchline.

So after I opened sets to pretty much the point where I was indifferent to opening any more sets and getting blown out, I winged Stallion for a set. That guy seems pretty money. I was busy trying to occupy the target's friend, but he was pretty on. The friend disappeared to the bar after a while, and Warwick announced that he was bouncing to a new venue.

We headed to a hotel lounge, which was quite a difference from the club. There was a single 2-set sitting at the bar, and I got the privilege of going up and approaching them. The set went reasonably well, and while I wasn't too into the target, they were fun to talk to. Warwick came in on the wing, and I blew out pretty quickly. I need to get better at frame control - I kept getting blown out by my own friends.

We then headed to the pretty much standard place to hang out. Some other guys were there as well (Pinnacle, Shadowfox, his friends). There were only a few sets, and I opened pretty much all of them. Some of them went fairly well - one group of foreign girls didn't understand my opener, and I was a bit forward with kino, which didn't help, but other than that the sets went pretty well.

One of the exercises Warwick gave me was to practice opening guy sets. Even though it won't directly get you laid, it can be good to make guy friends, and gives you an opportunity to practice being social. Also gets your confidence up for opening girl sets, and increases your ability to open mixed sets.

At about 1, the bar closed down, and I headed home (need to get on a more regular sleep schedule - if I'm going to go out 3 or 4 nights a week, and can't stay out until 3 am unless something special is happening).

My head is about to explode (I feel like I'm absorbing so much information that I don't know what to do with it).

I think that I'm going to give myself five points for the night, although I must have opened almost 15 sets, and only truly blew out a few. Actually, I forgot the one-set I opened on the subway and the one in Barnes and Noble, so more like seven for the day (now we're talking). Almost half-way there.