State-Independent Game

A major focus recently has been state-independent game. Lately I've been feeling less than optimal, due to a combination of:

- hating my internship
- lack of recent success with women
- crappy weather
- general malaise with my direction in live

This has caused my game to slump into a tailspin, and it has been hard to recover. I did a 1-on-1 with Doc Holliday about a week ago, and his most important feedback is that my game is too state-dependent. When I'm having a bad night (usually determined by my mood when I go out), my game sags into an unrecognizable mess.

His solution was to open with something a bit higher energy, and then to transition into a story. I resolved to do this - I started out by using one of his suggested openers. I then came up with a story, and resolved to transition into this story directly off the opener. To my surprise, it worked pretty well. Sets started hooking, even when I wasn't super high-energy and in-state. The problem is middle-game. I run these sets for a while, and they go ok, but I'm still not getting the level of interaction that I would randomly get before with state-based game. I think that its going to take a lot of work to make my game consistent to the point where I can run good game in any situation.

Here are some perceived sticking points:

Groups
I'm not yet good at running groups (still). A lot of times, I start out with a group, but then get left alone with one of the girls. The problem is that the pull-away inevitably comes a few minutes later. Even if the girl is enjoying the interaction, she is going to go with her friends (and girls pull their friends away with the most fucking retarded excuses). The only way to get around this is to ENGAGE THE GROUP. You have to befriend the entire group to get them to like you. At that point, you can switch to one girl, and they will leave you alone.

Another strategy that I could try is that, when the friends go away, I ask the girl where the friends went. We then find and reengage them.

I think that I should be able to get to the point where I always get blown out by the girl, and never by her friends.

Banter
I've been trying to tease, but haven't quite gotten there. My current method is to cold read things about the girl that are contrary to the topic of the conversation. This works sporadically (sometimes it gets a laugh, and sometimes it pushes the conversation forwards), but a lot of the time it is miscalibrated. Learning proper teasing is important. Champagne has some posts on this - I need to read these and try some of his techniques.

Building Attraction
Still not happening. I'm using a lot more kino, and girls usually aren't resistant to it, but it isn't necessarily building attraction. I think that I need to verbally escalate. On Friday, I unintentionally verbally escalated on a girl, and it definitely built attraction. She had a boyfriend, who we bumped into later, but she was definitely into me.