Why Cold Approaching is Pretty Much Useless

One of the basic ideas of the pickup community is the necessity of “cold approaches.” Often, you could get the impression that anything else doesn’t really count. Real PUAs go through hundreds of rejections before they finally get to enjoy the fruit of their labor. This is at least as the shared mythology goes.

In this article, I will show you that the concept of cold approaching is misleading. Please keep your pitchfork in your barn, because if you read on with an open mind, you will not only learn something about about male-female interactions, but you will also understand why, as guys gain more experience, their “batting average” often goes up significantly. No, it is not because their “game” got better. It’s something else.


Depending on the amount of community brainwashing you have undergone, it may be hard for you to swallow that success due to a genuinely cold approach does not exist. It is only due to ignoring or misinterpreting social cues that a guy thinks he got laid off a cold approach. Feel free to disagree with me later, but please read on, and carefully consider my point. In the end, you may even find that you agree with me.

I recently had an exchange with a commercial pickup coach in the comment section of my blog. In the article I had posted, I was mocking a rather illustrious character of the industry for wasting his time roaming the streets in his never-ending search for pussy. Success is not a friend of his. In the videos this guy posts, it is clear to see that the women normally aren’t interested at all and are only polite to him. The other aspect I pointed out was the absurd amount of time “sarging” takes. I met a handful of street gamers, and they all told me that their actual “conversion rate” (their terminology, not mine), was rather low.

Paul Janka, who is arguably the king of day game, says that he has sex with about 10% of the women whose number he gets. If you paid attention in middle school, you can deduce from this that the actual success rate is even lower since not all the women he approaches will give him their number. No, I do not want to bash Janka. I don’t know what he’s been up to recently, but my view of him is that he belongs to the very, very few honest dating coaches on this planet. Just keep the figure in mind for the following part.

Of course, there are ways to integrate “cold approaching” into your daily life, so that it comes at virtually zero cost. But once you free up time in your schedule to “sarge HBs”, the situation is much less favorable. I was mentioning a pickup coach who commented on my blog before. He said something like, “You may be right in general, but what if you have enough time for street game?” This is a nonsensical objection, and here is why:

You may think that you can take out one or two hours a day to do street game, and talk to girls who, for the very most part, will give you no indication that they have any interest in you. That’s of course because they don’t have any. I don’t care how good looking you think you are — most girls will just not be interested in you. (In me neither.) To increase your odds, you could therefore do something with your time you really enjoy. Surely, there is something that’s more compelling than getting rejected by one girl after another in streets and shopping malls.

The alternative is to pursue a social activity that allows you to easily meet women with whom you have something in common with. This instantly turns cold approaches into warm approaches! Let’s just compare two people: Pete PUA and Chris Common-Sense. Pete says to Chris, “Dude, you’re such a loser. You do gay shit like yoga and dancing, while I pickup chicks on da streets every day!!1” But what does Chris actually do? He enjoys yoga and find that it tones his body nicely. Because he really excels at it, there are plenty of hot girls around who give him fuck-me eyes. It seems that some “gay shit” like the crane pose easily gets him dates, and eventually laid.

Further, Chris likes music, especially tango. Salsa is not really his thing, so he doesn’t go there. But what happens at a typical tango class? Chris normally finds that there are about two girls for every guy, that the girls have on average more class than your random girl walking the streets (excuse the bad pun!). Even better is that some of those do indeed seem to be looking.

If you now think, “Sleazy, you’re just making this up!” I have to tell you that I don’t. I have spent about three years doing yoga, and it is my experience that is indeed fairly easy to talk to the girls there. You basically just have to go there. Of course, this only works if you go to classes because you like yoga, and not, like your typical PUA creep, to hit on girls. Dancing classes are just as excellent a venue to meet girls who already have something in common with you, but I won’t bore you with the details as it is just like in yoga. Even better is that you get to know the girls on a physical level. Just think of all the “kino” you could do, bro!

While Pete PUA spends much more time “sarging HBs”, his actual success rate will be fairly low. In the worst case, he’ll be like your average PUA and all the numbers turn out to flake. His buddy Chris, on the other hand, meets girls literally as an added bonus to acquiring interesting skills and staying in shape. After one year, he can probably start thinking about dancing tango competitively, while his buddy is at a risk of getting an account for Zan Perrions’s Ars Amatoria forum, where he can tell the crowd that he’s gotten one date out of about a thousand approaches, but that all is fine because he enjoyed making the girls feel desired. (I wish I had made this up.)

Let me deal with the objections I presume some of you will have.

1) “Geez, Sleazy, you built yourself a reputation as a club gamer, which was nothing but cold approaching! And don’t tell me you liked those places!!”

Indeed, I did enjoy the night clubs I went to. I loved the music, the crowd, and the ambience. With very, very few exceptions I did stay away from mainstream clubs. As people who want to get into some of my old hangouts week after week notice, the door man is indeed an obstacle, and the patrons are carefully selected. This was true for the indie/electro scene in London, and to a lesser extent it is true for the techno scene in Berlin. If the guy at the door doesn’t like you, you probably have to check out a mainstream venue afterwards.

However, what people who either don’t go out regularly, or who go out indiscriminately, not realize is that the guys at the door don’t reject people randomly. They only tell you to take a hike if you don’t fit into the crowd. Yes, “there’s too many guys inside” and “sorry, we’re full” are just excuses to allow you to save face. When I was once walking down to one of my favourite watering holes in Soho in London, and, after considerable time in the queue, thought I was about to get in, the door guy pulled me aside, and whispered, “Just stay here for a while. We’re a bit packed right now.” Seconds later, he was telling the next bunch of people the same old excuses. Bottom line: If you fit in, you’ll get in, and if you get in, you pretty much have a stamp of approval on your forehead, and will normally find it easy to talk to the people.

2) “But dude, cold approaching works. It really does! I just had a date last week, after hitting on 98 girls in a row. And just earlier today, I got seven more numbers.”

As I said above, the success rates for genuine cold approaches are very low. Of course, sometimes you’ll get a girl, and if you are Harvard-educated, and as eloquent and handsome as Paul Janka, you may end up banging then percent of all the girls whose number you get. However, as you get more experience in general, your ratio will usually go up a lot. This is not because you get “better at game” but because you learn to read signals better, and focus on girls who are potentially receptive. Thus, you skip all the questionable cold approaches. This is the truth behind cold approaches, and, to take a page out of the marketing book of PUAs, this is indeed “one of the truths PUAs don’t want you to know.”



The reason why you may now think that your game is decent and that you “convert x percent of your cold approaches” is just that you can’t yet read signals properly and approach indiscriminately. While you “run the same game” on every girl, you just happen to occasionally bump into one that just likes you. Since you are more concerned with your game than her reaction to your presence, you may miss that she’s been glancing over three times already. Being blind to the obvious, you think that “game” got you the girl. However, with a more perceptive eye, you’d have to do a fraction of the approaches, and will have a much better turnout.



All of this doesn’t mean that you’ll now suddenly get every girl, but by focussing on girls you have something in common with and who are potentially interested, you’ll do so much better. Heck, maybe pickup will even start to become fun for you, and stop being a source of constant frustration. It’s the warm approaches that eventually get you the girls. Your cold approaches get you barely anything, and the little you get feels like work, because it is. Just think of all the “shit tests” you have to “plow through” now… Imagine you’d instead be among women who think, “Hm… I wonder who that guy is!”