A Resource for Beginners

Recently, a guy on my forum asked me for a resource for beginners. This reminded me of an old blog post of mine, back when I was writing on Wordpress. I dug it up and updated it a little bit.



You can read “A very short Guide to Seduction” on my forum.

I modified the text only slightly, but I may rework it in greater detail and eventually release it as a free PDF and in a more appealing layout.

What Chess and “Game” have in common

Many years ago, the chess-bug had caught me for a while. I bought dozens of books, spent literally hours every day to study the game, and I got reasonably good. This means, I was good enough to grasp the fundamentals of the game, but I certainly wouldn’t have been able to hold a candle to a master. Nonetheless, my insights into this board game where profound enough to know when someone is talking out of his a** when it comes to chess. Yes, I’m going to do some community bashing, but please bear with me, there is something to be learnt here.

First of all, a beginner thinks he has to consider every move and wrongly believes that chess is all about thinking x moves ahead. But the contrary is much closer to the truth. While chess is a game of strategy that requires long-term thinking, mere powers of calculation won’t get you anywhere if you have no idea of basic principles such as pawn formations or open lines. Heck, a beginner doesn’t even see the “lines” and he can’t even evaluate the relative strength of various moves. The parallels to “structured game” as taught by some in the community are obvious.

Further, the in chess the number of possible moves is absurdly high. Some claim it’s higher than the number of elements in the universe. Of course, the vast majority of all possible moves is bad, but even if you focus on just the potentially good ones, you’ll quickly reach the limits of your mental capacity. What does that leave us with? Intuition.

I have recently read the somewhat dry book "Bobby Fischer goes to War", which recounts the famous 1972 world chess championship match between Fischer and Spassky, a contest that frequently got interpreted as a battle of Capitalism (US) and Communism (USSR). Apart from insights into cold war politics, it had some decent descriptions of the aspects of the game of chess as well, such as this one (p. 64):

The real explanation of what chess players do is less rational. It is closer to what we might think of as an artist’s vision and has to do with a kind of intuition. A chess player examining a position does not see an inanimate set of carved or moulded pieces waiting to be moved from square to square, but diagonals and ranks and latent possibilities; what Arthur Koestler described as ‘a magnetic field of forces charged with energy’.

The same is true when it comes to seduction. It is not a matter of rationality, as the proponents of “structured game” claim. You can surely have some success with it, but you will never get a real understanding of the deeper principles. It’s like with chess computers, who have tremendous powers of calculations. In this regard, they were hugely superior to human players, but could (until relatively recently) be beaten with certain anti-computer tactics that specifically addressed their weaknesses. In the meantime, though, grand masters and programmers teamed up and created beasts such as Hydra (which incidentally got beaten by a computer-assisted human player).

We don’t blindly calculate possible moves in our head, but we see the possibilities --- and we follow a strategy. That’s why a solid “game plan”, i.e. you know where you are going and you are not just fishing in the dark, is so important. The individual moves (“routines” and “techniques”) are far less important.

The New Thing in the Seduction Community: Not Getting Laid and Being Proud of it!?

The user "Angel" on my forum recently made an interesting observation. Personally, I don't pay much attention to the mainstream seduction community, but he made me aware that there was a recent push of "enlightenment", telling people that they don't need to get laid:

Well, the last few months, in my opinion, I seem to notice a 'trend' that 'inner game and enlightenment' replaces the desire for sex. Its like the guru's out there realised that the guys arent getting laid with their programs, so now they are all coming out with programs to 'become a better man' (cleverly masking the fact that their programs dont work). Inner game and self development cannot become an excuse to not approach or sleep with women I feel. It is perfectly possible to evolve as a man AND sleep with women. In Belgium, the new trend towards 'evolving as a man and inner game' is now used as an excuse of not approaching: I know guys who used to approach and fail, but now stopped approaching all together as they read someone's programme of 'not pursuing', so there basically going out and standing there like they did before the comminuty, but now they actually think they are doing something good (I hope I explain this well).

Check my forum for the full thread. You have to register an account if you don't have one yet.

I'm pretty sure I have heard a similar spin from some Real Social Dynamics guys: "It's all inner game, and if your inner game is tight, the girls will just come." It surely helps protecting the ego.

Not approaching and claiming that this would allow you to become a "better" man is a ridiculous idea. It is less ridiculous than "peacocking" though, instead of dressing with style, which is harder than wearing bizarre necklaces.

The thought that you have to "approach" all the time and sleep with as many women as possible is juvenile to me. People join the pickup community for many reasons, and one is to get a stable sex life. However, what many discover is that once they got a couple of women, this desire usually dissipates. If sex is all you want, why not just stick with a girl you find attractive and like for her personality?

A guy that goes out and picks up girl after girl, even in the rare case that he is successful, reminds me of this Greek fellow. When I began to devote a lot of time to seduction, I realised that the usual "take a girl home" route was on some level boring and predictable. Thus, I experimented with introducing chaotic elements. If you do something that is completely out of the ordinary, you never know what kind of reaction you will yield. Ever tried to kiss a girl right off the bat?

As I ticked off goal after goal, I eventually saw myself getting bored with pickup again. At first I thought the pinnacle was bathroom sex. (See my book for highlights of my development as a seducer.)
Then I lost momentum for a few months. Looking for new goals, I came up with the idea of trying to figure out how to pull girls based merely on escalation. Some weeks later I managed to seduce girls completely non-verbally. The second time, the thrill is not as high. Another goal of mine was pulling a girl instantly. I ticked off that one shortly afterwards. Boredom set in again.

Since I was seeing some girls virtually all the time anyway, chasing sex from new women became less motivating. It all felt way too familiar and unexciting. Eventually, I ended up shrugging off nights as banal where I entered a club, made out with one girl instantly, got bored of her, made out with another one instantly as well, took her to the bathroom a bit later, and eventually back home --- and I didn't even bother writing it up because there was nothing new about it.

Some say the chase is more exciting than the consumption, but once the chase is boring, it's time to realign your life. You either set yourself new goals or look for something else. Once you have reached the sex life you wanted, you can lean back, but anybody who is unsuccessful and choses a path of "self-actualisation" as an excuse of honing his skills as a seducer got it backwards. Some time ago there was a huge push to become "social" instead of learning how to get laid. Now it is this nonsense. I wonder what will be the next big thing of the mainstream industry. Maybe teaching guys how to get laid for a change?