Game Roosh V.pdf

Game Roosh Valizadeh © 2018 by Roosh Valizadeh http://www.rooshv.com All rights reserved  Table Of Contents Prologue 1 Chapter 1: Introduction To Game 4 Chapter 2: Internal Game 22 Chapter 3: Pre-Game 39 Chapter 4: Att...

Game Roosh Valizadeh © 2018 by Roosh Valizadeh http://www.rooshv.com All rights reserved  Table Of Contents Prologue 1 Chapter 1: Introduction To Game 4 Chapter 2: Internal Game 22 Chapter 3: Pre-Game 39 Chapter 4: Attraction 60 Chapter 5: The Roosh Program 83 Chapter 6: Approaching 105 Chapter 7: Dating 195 Chapter 8: Sex 258 Chapter 9: Relationships 277 Chapter 10: Conclusion 316 Appendix 1: Social Circle Game 326 Appendix 2: Love Tourism 335  Prologue In early 2006, I started writing my first book Bang. I could not have predicted that it would become one of the preeminent resources to help men with their dating lives. Since then, I’ve tried to surpass its popularity with more than fifteen other books, but with the exception of Day Bang, none of them have come remotely close. Parents are told not to show overt favoritism to one particular child, but if my books were my children, Bang would be my favorite. Besides an update in 2010 to cover text messaging game and going out solo, I have not made any additional edits that address the massive changes we’ve seen in culture and technology. Many men believe that the most damaging change to society has been the widespread adoption of smartphones, which women treat as surrogate boyfriends, but even worse is the normalization of feminism and social justice. These leftist ideas have increased the hostility between the sexes by inventing myths such as rape culture, the wage gap, and gender fluidity. It would not be an exaggeration to state that relations between the sexes are the worst they’ve ever been, with both women and men developing a genuine animosity for each other. Explaining the cause of this hostility, and why I believe it’s a deliberate agenda of the elites, is another subject entirely—this book instead provides men with non-political advice on how to connect with the opposite sex in an era when it’s become harder than ever to do so. I am writing this book for many reasons. The first, to be honest, is pride. There is nothing more rewarding than creating something that elevates your esteem among your fellow man. Second, you have demanded it. A week doesn’t pass without me being asked to share updated game advice. Bang has withstood the test of time more than I could’ve expected, but I must admit that it is showing signs of age. My livelihood depends on satisfying the customer—ask and you shall 1  GAME receive. Lastly, I want to protect you from danger. Women are being trained to believe they have been raped when they weren’t, and new laws are making it easier to ruin a man’s life with dubious allegations that have zero physical evidence. This rape-obsessed climate did not exist when I wrote Bang, so I did not lay out protocols and defense mechanisms to minimize your chance of getting caught in the cultural snares that are elevating women to the status of eternal victims while redefining normal masculinity as “toxic” or even criminal. In this book, I will give you advice that I have given to my college-aged brother, who I have a strong interest in keeping safe. Regrettably, the best era to be a player has passed. Between 1990 and 2010, sexual norms were loosest and there was no feminist or government persecution of men. During this time, feminism was a rising cultural force, but it mostly focused on issues such as abortion, domestic violence, and workplace sexual harassment. Once feminists had achieved their goals in those areas, they moved onto college campuses and promoted “rape culture,” which attempted to redefine sex and intimate relationships for everyone. With the help of the media, universities, police departments, courts, and governments, they have successfully given women a rape card to use anytime they feel regretful, sad, or depressed. The player era ended when these ideas started to infect the mainstream. There is now more downside than upside for sleeping with whomever you can. What a great time it was in 2005 when sex was relatively easy, with zero chance of being accused of rape after a consensual sexual encounter that happened to involve alcohol. False accusations were barely heard of back then. I remember laughing at the crazy online rantings of beastly women claiming that “all sex is rape,” failing to see how such a preposterous notion would become a dystopian reality. As the years passed, I started hearing stories from friends about women acting weird after sex and making vague statements about being taken “advantage” of. Soon I received emails from worried men stating that girls were accusing them of rape outright and might go to the police. Then I got a panicked call from a close friend who needed advice on what to do after the police showed up at his door to investigate a rape claim. I believe that all these cases involved 2  PROLOGUE consensual sex, but those in power can change the definition of consensual sex. Laws can be altered to make illegal what was once legal, and I have no doubt that they will keep being changed until every single sexual encounter that a man has could be interpreted as rape by the judicial system. This will happen within my lifetime. Since the judicial system is being subverted, we must rely on our behavior, intelligence, and knowledge to stay safe. The days of racking up notches and banging drunk girls have come to an end. You now have to say “no” to women who want to have sex with you if they’ve shown signs of derangement or instability. Otherwise, I can almost guarantee that you will have problems if you try to live out a dream of sleeping with hundreds of women. The ideal game plan today is to find a mentally stable girl who has some resistance to feminist ideas, and entering at least a mini relationship with her. I know that you bought this book to improve your sex life instead of worrying about crazy changes that are happening to the culture, but understand that we can no longer separate the two. I’m confident this book will account for those changes so that you can stay out of harm’s way and enjoy pleasant relationships with women, whether for the short or the long term. Reading Bang is not a prerequisite to getting the most out of this book. Game is not an “advanced” or upgraded version of Bang, but a rebooted game book based on ten years of additional experience. I purposefully did not look at Bang before writing Game, so if you read something here that you remember from Bang, it’s an idea or tactic that strongly correlates to sexual success. I will now teach you absolutely everything I know about game and women. Let’s begin. 3  Chapter 1: Introduction To Game Beautiful girls in big cities are now directly and indirectly offered sex more than 1,000 times a month from men on the internet, in bars, on the streets, and within their social circles. If a girl has a basic internet profile, spends time on social networking, and goes out twice a week, I guarantee that she is offered more cock than even the most famous women of the past. A girl is not interested in 99% of the men who offer her sex, but try to imagine the effect on your psychology if 1,000 women a month were trying to have sex with you. What kind of person would that make you? I can tell you what I would be like if I were getting over 1,000 sex offers every month: I’d be spoiled rotten, thinking that I deserved all those women just because I existed. I’d be flakey, cancelling dates often, because I’d constantly be unsure whether I was getting the “best” possible girl. I’d be bitchy to women who didn’t read my mind and failed to treat me exactly the way I wanted, because don’t they know that I could sleep with hundreds of other women any time I wanted? I’d be moody, always dependent on the reactions I get from women. If I received less attention one weekend than usual, I’d throw a temper tantrum and demand immediate satisfaction. I’d also get bored easily. With so many women constantly trying to entertain me, I wouldn’t be able to tolerate five minutes with a boring girl who didn’t jump through hoops to make me laugh. Lastly, I’d be primed to value novelty more than stability. I’d become addicted to experienc- ing one new girl after the next, and believe excitement and fun were worth more than stability and commitment. My attention span would morph into that of a small child. Haven’t I just described the modern woman? While a large part of who we are is shaped by our genetics, environment plays a huge role, and when your environment is getting nonstop attention from 4  INTRODUCTION TO GAME thousands of people trying to have sex with you, your personality and even your humanity will become degraded, making it hard for you to connect meaningfully with anyone. Trying to find lasting love, comfort, and stability with a modern woman is like trying to have a deep conversation with a cat that just wants to chase after a red laser dot darting around on the floor. I’m sure you’ve had the experience of losing a girl’s attention in a bar or nightclub and watching her get approached by another man not even ten minutes later. Even girls in small towns are getting hit on a lot. I’ve met girls from backwater European villages who can describe to me all the local beta orbiters who are trying to sleep with them, the Spanish or British tourists who have approached them in the mall, and men on the internet who are outright offering them gifts and free travel just for the chance of landing a date. Understand that the amount of dating choice a woman has is the primary driver that determines how we must structure our game. The more choice a woman has, the more methodical our game has to be. Girls have become so used to having ample choice in men that they believe things have always been like this, not aware that just a few generations ago, they would’ve been lucky to have only two good men a year knocking on their door. Most of this choice is a result of technology, which allows women to access and “meet” more men in one day for sex than they could have in an earlier lifetime. Since technology is continuing to advance rapidly, I don’t envision a return to the old ways. If anything, it will soon become impossible for a man who doesn’t use some sort of game strategy to even get a date. Paradoxically, we are living in both the best and worst time for sexual relations. It’s the best because sexual norms are still loose enough where you can have sex with a girl without committing to her, even traveling around the world to do so, but it’s also the worst because women have far more choice than you, which allows them to demand men of the highest standard while the culture gives them a free pass to attack men if they feel bad or upset at any moment. Since we don’t have the power to change the culture, the best plan is to mitigate the bad while maximizing the benefits that we can receive. With the stage set, let’s start talking about what game is and how it can enable us to get what we want. 5  GAME What Is Game? Game is a collection of beliefs, behaviors, strategies, and tactics that make women more attracted to you while increasing your likelihood of experiencing intimacy. It’s often based on cold ap- proaching, an active strategy where you walk up to a girl you don’t know and present yourself in the best way possible so that she decides, at some point, to have sex with you. Game can also be used on girls within your social circle, a more passive strategy where you have to be less aggressive, because a hard rejection may lower your status within the group. It doesn’t matter if you are rejected a dozen times a day when cold approaching, because you probably won’t ever see those girls again, but within a specific social circle it’s best not to work on more than one or two girls at the same time to keep conflict and drama at bay. The popular misconception about game is that it’s simply a collec- tion of pick-up lines where you walk up to a girl and say something cheesy while wearing an outlandish hat. Not only is it more strategic than that, but game has evolved into a more holistic program of changing your appearance, behavior, and living habits. I remember the days when boldly approaching a girl was enough for her to think you were confident and attractive, but now that girls are approached so frequently, how bold is she going to think you are when you’re the third guy to speak to her that day? As time passes, higher levels of game are required to accomplish the same result. Back in 2002, the game I needed consisted of rubbing my crotch against a girl’s ass while dancing, asking “What is your name?” after a few songs, having a short, banal conversation before resuming crotch-on-ass dancing, and eventually getting her number. Not only is that type of game insufficient today, but it may get you kicked out of the nightclub. When I got a girl on a date, I would use the “roller coaster” routine that I found on the internet. I’d tell her about the experience of going on a wild roller-coaster ride, up and down, up and down, and how thrilling and exciting the ride was, and how I wanted to go on this ride again and again. The goal of this sexual metaphor was to make the girl horny, and although I’m not sure if it ever did, I never received a bad response. If I tried this routine today, the girl would stare at her 6  INTRODUCTION TO GAME iPhone before announcing that she has to leave. I used countless other awkward moves successfully, but now girls expect much more. If you’re living in a hyper-competitive city that has as many men as women, your game has to be above average just to pull a cute girl, and once you find an effective game strategy, you’ll continually have to improve it so that the tens of thousands of men who are working on their game don’t surpass you. On the surface, it seems crazy that a man has to put in massive amounts of work in order to have sex with the women he wants, but men who don’t use game, who toil in jobs or businesses to accumu- late money and fancy cars in order to impress women, are doing the same thing. They’re just relying on “provider” game that used to work before women made their own money or had a wide choice of who to date. Because having a good job or car is no longer a reliable way to secure the affections of a pretty girl, a more direct method in the form of modern game was developed, which has a far higher return on investment than trying to impress a girl with your career or material possessions. All around you, men are working hard to get sex, from learning game, opening bars, incurring massive debt to appear rich, or trying to become famous. I’m in my late thirties and can go an entire day without thinking about sex, but I remember when I was in my twenties and couldn’t go an hour. I won’t ever shame a man for moving mountains in order to get laid, because I know that when your hormones are at their peak, you don’t want to hear rational explana- tions or embrace Buddhist ideas about not desiring pleasure. You want sex and you want it now. My job is to help you meet that need in the healthiest way possible while preventing it from ruining your life. The bad news is that it was easier to help you move that mountain years ago when few men were game-aware and only a small percent- age of the female population were lesbians, morbidly obese, or green- haired man-haters. There are more men eager for sex with attractive girls than there are attractive girls. This crisis of supply and demand means you will have to work harder to get even less than I did when I was running game full time in the early 2000s, and young boys today will face an even greater struggle than you when they grow up and become men. I fondly remember one of my first successful nightclub pick-ups 7  GAME back in 2001. It was my third or so visit to the club after graduating from college. I had no idea what I was doing, but I wanted sex badly. I tried my crotch-on-ass dancing move and it worked on a cute Filipino virgin. She gave me her number and I called her. I managed to get her out on a date where I essentially rehearsed memorized routines I had read on the internet. I guess they worked because she allowed me to kiss her. On the second date, I invited her to my apartment. She put up heavy resistance when I tried to take off her clothes, so I did the first thing that came into my mind: I put on a VHS tape of hardcore pornography. It didn’t work at getting off her clothes. Do you know what I did next? I gave up! I just stopped calling her because I didn’t know what else to do. It’s a miracle that I got as far as I did, and I wonder whether today an attractive Filipino girl of her age would respond to my moves in the same way as the virgin did more than fifteen years ago. Chances are she’d have over 1,000 thirsty male followers on Instagram and get approached in the club by guys who have a more refined technique than my crotch-on-ass move. Back then, the Filipino girl didn’t have many options, so my awkward self was enough to get her out on a date, but today she could pick and choose from a greater supply of men. A low level of game used to get you dates with attractive women, but advances in technology—particularly the invention of the smartphone—have turned game into an arms race, where every year the level of game that women expect rises in tandem with their options. I experienced this directly in Toronto when I visited in 2013. From the girls I talked to, I noticed that I was being evaluated on every joke I told. They would actually complain if a joke wasn’t great, and suggest that I was “losing” them because of it. Instead of wanting to connect with men, the girls acted like they were attending a comedy show, eggs in hand, ready to throw them at the comedian if he didn’t make them laugh hard enough. It’s no surprise that a substantial percentage of my readers come from the Toronto area. Another reason for the game arms race is the existence of teachers like me. My websites and books are training a large number of men to use game. The more men who know how to use game, the harder things get for every man, because the standard of game that women expect rises. Fortunately, I’m finding that game is becoming less 8  INTRODUCTION TO GAME popular than before. The younger generation of men is becoming lazier and softer than men of previous generations, mostly because they are addicted to video games, porn, estrogenic soy products, or social networking. This tells me that the technology which allows women to have more dating options is a far greater contributor to the need for higher levels of game than the availability of game knowledge alone. Whatever the reason for the game arms race, the reality is that you have to become like a doctor who must keep up with the latest medical advances to try improved treatments on your “patients.” Thankfully, once you have a basic foundation of game, it’s quite simple to maintain it at an optimal level, and by then it’s likely that you’ll have discovered a niche or two that reduces the amount of work you have to do. An additional factor that makes game necessary is that the ratio of men compared to women in the population is far higher compared with the past, when frequent wars killed men almost exclusively. Although I do not wish for a huge war to make my sex life easier, the period of peace and stability we’re living in is one of the factors that led to the creation of game in the first place. If there were two women for every one able-bodied man, a book like this wouldn’t even be necessary. Instead, women would need books on how to compete for the few available men. Game ends up becoming a scavenger strategy in any environment where there is a decreasing supply of quality females who have unlimited choice on who to date. It works in any society with loose sexual norms and declining birth rates, factors that signify the breakdown of the family unit and the promotion of “free love,” where people have sex just for fun. There is a reason that my books don’t sell well in countries with high birth rates, such as those in Africa, or where the traditional family is strong, such as those in the Middle East. The more fractured a society is, the greater the opportunity for game tactics to be useful for men who desire sexual relationships, as long as they continually upgrade their game or find niches that enable them to achieve consistent results among a fickle and bored female population. The biological justification for game is strong: most women crave alpha males who display strength, confidence, and power, but game is not effective in a Muslim country, for example, where pre-marital sex 9  GAME is forbidden and women are not allowed to choose their marriage partner. The only reason you can use game is because your society is firmly on a path that will lead to a declining population and its eventual death. The relatively easy sex we can get with game is a symptom of this decline, but since time immemorial men have powerfully desired sex and will do almost anything to get it, whether it’s marrying at a young age, as they did in the past, or approaching twenty women a week, as they may do today. Game, however, is of little help when you start to demand more from a woman in a long- term relationship, such as honesty, loyalty, and character. Game is a great tool for initiating a sexual relationship with a woman within a society that’s declining, and for identifying the few good women left, but it does not create good women. I have many critics who argue that I’m making society worse by teaching game to men, or that I’m corrupting “innocent” women, but a woman who sleeps with a man relatively quickly because of his game is far from innocent. Society, thanks largely to liberalism and technology, has made women promiscuous, and now we are using game to have the sex they’ve already decided they want, and which society has trained them to feel empowered for having. Every slut used to be an innocent and socially awkward virgin, and if you look at how high-school girls behave today, and who their role models are, you don’t have to be Nostradamus to predict that the situation will continue to get worse. The decline of Western society is out of our hands, but at least we can use the experience of getting sex to build our confidence and become stronger, more satisfied men. Along the way, you will have to overcome many insecurities and personal demons to go from a man who isn’t getting laid frequently or meeting attractive women to one who is. Game has the potential to bring out the best in men, more than any other modern behavior available to them, because getting laid in a competitive environment unlocks your most masculine qualities. Consider the type of game your grandfathers had to use on your grandmothers. In all likelihood, it was to be good men, get involved with the church, line up stable jobs, and be friendly. They didn’t have to sleep with a dozen or more girls to enter a relationship that would last less than a year. There was no conscious effort on their part to try to be an alpha male or not to appear needy. When “grandfather game” 10  INTRODUCTION TO GAME becomes the best game to land a great woman, I will be the first to get excited, but we have to admit that your grandfathers may not have reproduced today if they had been forced to meet your grandmothers in the kind of climate we have to face. Since game is a scavenger tool in a rapidly changing environment, we constantly have to be ready to adjust our tactics. Although the core principles of game remain the same, shifting trends and demographics may affect what works, and you’ll have to stay on top of them to maintain results. For example, cities in Eastern Europe and Asia are starting to see a large increase in the number of male tourists and immigrants. I’m hearing complaints from men visiting Southeast Asia, one of the easiest places in the world for Western men, that things are not as good as in the past because the local women are getting spoiled. A time will come when a strategy or tool that worked well stops working, forcing you to adapt. The advice I share in this book assumes that things will continue to get worse for many decades into the future. Adaptation is a concept you may be familiar with when it comes to doing business. Hundreds of years ago, a shoemaker would set up shop in a little store and make shoes for his entire life, with little change in how he did things. Today, technology and globalization mean that a shoemaker has to change his tactics every six or twelve months to maintain a consistent level of business. He has to compete not only with every shoemaker in his city, but also with every shoemaker with a website in the next city, and every shoemaker in China who can make shoes for half the price he does. If the shoemak- er doesn’t match or beat the advantages offered by his global competitors, he will go out of business. You have to keep an eye on what your potential customers want and what is working for your competitors. If you don’t, you won’t make any sales. Modern dating is not much different. It has become a system of commerce where men and women can seek partners around the world, often without even leaving their couches. It’s great that you can try to date beautiful women in Europe through the internet, but the downside is that these women can meet high-status men world- wide with even greater ease than you. It used to be that you had to compete only with the men in the bar you were visiting, or perhaps the men a woman interacted with that day at work, but now you’re 11  GAME effectively competing with men from the entire world. You may be the top guy in the bar right now, but you’re definitely not the top guy in the world, and she knows this because many of them are messaging her daily through internet sites and apps. Meanwhile, cheap air travel allows “exotic” men who are sexier than you to fly in and impress her with their foreign accents. The globalization of male-female bonding has transformed it from traditional monogamy to a free-for-all sexual marketplace. As with any other marketplace, the Pareto principle is at play where the top 20% of goods (men) attract the top 80% of shoppers (women). In the past, women had fewer choices and were constrained from acting on their desire to secure a top-tier man. Today, they are encouraged to spend years finding high-status men (and to get fat and tatted up while they’re at it). The end result is fewer monogamous relation- ships, families, and children. I hope you can see how the modern sexual marketplace creates fierce competition where a man has to increase his value as much as possible simply to have sex, with no guarantee that he will enter a monogamous relationship that leads to establishing a family, a prospect that many men come to see as negative or even harmful after having to deal with the amoral and promiscuous modern woman. For many men, game is a strategy to have a bit of fun and get a girlfriend. After all, it’s difficult to invest your time, year after year, into adapting to constantly changing conditions that are pushing down the quality of women, all for sex that becomes less novel with experience. Many men who thought they had solved their problems by hopping on a plane to South America, Southeast Asia, or Eastern Europe have seen the women in foreign countries degrade as well, while the march of technological progress continues to make it easier for thousands of men to hit on a single woman. An app such as Tinder was well received by men when it first came out, because of how easy it was to get a date, but now those same men are complaining that it benefits mainly women. Things are not going to get any better if technology continues to supplant face-to-face communication, traditional monogamy is not promoted, and the male-to-female ratio remains high. This means that game will be absolutely necessary just to get laid, and this game must always be refreshed, upgraded, and adjusted to produce results over 12  INTRODUCTION TO GAME the long term. It’s hard to continue committing your time to something that you value less with every passing year, so for most men game has a definite lifespan, even if that span may be as long as twenty years. When I first got into game, I valued nothing more than getting a new girl in my bed for sex, but as time went on, I started to value other things such as a good night’s sleep, not being hungover the next day, and getting work done. Since how you value sex today will change tomorrow, think about how you will exit the game once you’ve had your fill by keeping an eye out for the type of girl who you’d consider suitable for a long-term relationship. If you’re sure that you don’t want any sort of relationship, you should focus on continually adapting your game over time to suit changing conditions and your advancing age. The Nature Of Game The goal of game for me was to lose my virginity and get a girl- friend. I was a late bloomer and didn’t even start puberty until I was 18, so I looked like a child next to guys who were the same age as me. In college, I attempted to use the strategy of being friends with a girl to get sex from her, but of course that didn’t work. After learning game and losing my virginity, I experienced such a great thrill from sleeping with a new girl that I kept going instead of focusing on relationships. Game became more about conquest and excitement than intimate connection, until the novelty of it all wore off and my energy declined. Your game goals will primarily depend on the quality of women around you and how suitable they are for long-term relationships. The lower the quality and the less suitable they are, the more likely you will decide—consciously or subconsciously—that banging a lot of them is the best outcome, but if you’re surrounded by virgins who want to be honorable and traditional wives, you are unlikely to conclude that going on a decade-long bang mission is the best course of action. If I had asked you in the 1950s what the purpose of game was, you’d have said that it was to find a wife so that you could create a 13  GAME family. Back then, there was little playing around because the infrastructure of bars, shopping malls, and internet, which allow you to meet random women easily, did not exist. You would meet one good woman, marry her, and spend the rest of your life with her. It also helped that it was harder for her to cheat since there was no social networking that enabled other men to invite her out for “coffee.” If I had asked you in the late 1980s what the purpose of game was, you’d probably have said that it was to have a bit of fun before finding a wife. After the sexual revolution of the 1970s, women were starting to enjoy random sexual attention while their resistance to sleeping with a man they barely knew decreased. Night venues were being constructed to make it easier for men and women to meet for the purpose of having sex. The divorce rate started to climb, partially thanks to no-fault divorce laws, and men started to become more skeptical of marriage. If I had to ask you today what your game goals are, what would be your answer? My guess is that it would fall on one of two extremes. Either you are looking for one special girl to have a family with or you want to simulate a rock-star lifestyle and sleep with a lot of girls for fun. Few men would say they are looking for a wife, even though having a family may be at the back of their minds, because wife- worthy women are disappearing, the likelihood of a successful marriage is decreasing, and the punishments sustained by men—but not women—for a failed marriage are severe. In the past, a man who just wanted to sleep around was looked on as crazy, because there were so many potential wives around, but today the man who wants to get married is seen as crazy, because marriage has become such a bad deal for men. Over the decades, the goals of men have shifted from family to fun because of changes in the environment. If you are entering the game with the goal of starting a long-term relationship, your experience in the unregulated sexual marketplace may change that notion, because you will see firsthand how women flake, lie, cheat on their boyfriends to sleep with you, disappear without explanation, and refuse to assume the traditional female role of taking care of the home and her man. In your darkest hours, you will begin to doubt that “good” girls exist at all, making you more cynical that a long-term relationship can 14  INTRODUCTION TO GAME be sustained in an environment that seems to be doing everything possible to prevent family formation. You may even completely write off long-term relationships and decide that you want to bang a rotating supply of sluts indefinitely, turning your game goal into one of hedonistic entertainment. Do you remember having a favorite movie when you were young? You probably watched it ten times until finally you got tired of it and moved on to something else. Today, you’d watch that movie only to feel nostalgic. If you use game for purely hedonistic purposes, it will be self-limiting, not unlike watching the same movie over and over again. Humans are resistant to putting in time and work for decreas- ing rewards. Without having a goal of securing a long-term relationship, game will likely be a phase of your life to satisfy you sexually, occupy your free time, and challenge you in a way that results in an enhancement to your masculinity. If a man playing the game doesn’t have an exit strategy of a lasting relationship, there is a high chance he will become jaded and be less interested in women at the end of his journey than he was at the beginning, because he will have repeatedly encountered their most negative traits. The secret to being a success story with game instead of a burn-out case is to extract the self- improvement benefits that encourage your development as a man while having a general idea of what you’ll do when your desires change and your willingness to put in work for sex declines. In spite of the potential for game burn-out, a man who is tired of women suffers less than a man who can’t sleep with them. With game, you may experience a variety of middling outcomes down the line, but without game, you get no sex. Even if you have good looks, or a niche in life where random women become attracted to you, a lack of game will prevent you from closing the deal. Simply reading this book once, and remembering a handful of random details about what to do in the presence of women, or remembering details on what not to do, will do more to increase your lifelong success with women than doing nothing at all. Just like how every man needs to own a set of basic tools to repair his car or home, every man needs to possess the basics of game, which at a minimum require a part-time commitment during the phase of his life when he is most motivated to meet women. If you want sex 15  GAME at all, even the shallowest sex that doesn’t begin to satisfy your emotional needs, you’ll need game, unless you want to pay for hookers or become celibate, neither of which require you to read a book such as this. Achieving Competent Game When I wrote Bang, I imagined in the future writing an “Advanced Bang” that included more complex game methods to achieve even higher rewards, but I’ve learned that extra game past a certain point won’t bring you better results. The reality of diminishing returns means that having three times better game when you’re already competent won’t bring you three times the quantity of women, or women who are three times hotter. Once you’ve achieved competent game, which I define as having the ability to cold approach attractive women in a specific environment with reasonable odds of getting one into bed before exhausting yourself, your time is better spent doing things other than dedicating it to women. Your game should be strong enough so that, if you’re able to find or identify a girl who is attracted to you, you know how to take her to bed without making huge mistakes that cost you the lay. To reach that goal, you will need to accumulate a notch count of about ten, with at least half of them coming from cold approaches, where you walk up to a woman you don’t know and try to start a conversation with her. Looking back at my game history, after I had been with ten women (mostly from cold approaches), I had a solid enough understanding of the game process from beginning to end that I could adapt it to any environment. Most of the game skills I learned after my tenth lay were more necessary to teach game to other men and become a respected “game guru” than to benefit me personally. You can aim for more than ten lays, but the danger of doing so is that it can turn you into an addict who uses women to achieve an emotional or ego high, where the experience of laying girls you don’t particularly care for becomes the purpose of your life. If you’re unable to lay a girl, you remain sad and depressed. In my case, if I didn’t have sex with a girl soon after I had arrived in a foreign country, I became upset and wondered whether I was some sort of 16  INTRODUCTION TO GAME failure. When your existence becomes bound up with how women respond to you, you become a slave to getting laid, just like how a cocaine addict structures his entire life around his drug use. The ten-lay guideline ensures that you learn enough skills to be- come competent at game without it becoming an addiction. The signs that you’re addicted to game include pursuing girls you’re not really interested in, immediately wanting to text a buddy after a new lay to brag about your achievement, maintaining a detailed record of your lays with the intention of adding to your count, and setting random time-based goals such as sleeping with a certain number of girls in a weekend. If you start doing any of these things, you’re using game for ego gratification or entertainment rather than to establish healthy relations with women. Not surprisingly, I did all of these things at my game peak. I wish I could tell you that if you sleep with 100 girls, you’ll be enveloped by a magic aura and never stop feeling happy, masculine, and strong, but that hasn’t been the case for me or the men I’ve known. Once you hit 100 notches, you’ll start hearing about men who have counts of 200, 300, or even higher, and suddenly your achieve- ment won’t seem all that significant. In fact, you’ll feel less happy and secure with 100 notches than when you hit ten. And guess how many of those 100 girls you’ll actually remember? Unless you save their photos or maintain a detailed record, you’ll be able to recall only the top three or four girls you were with. Ask an addict about his most memorable drug experiences and he’ll tell you about his first high and a few others that had a novel feature attached, but he won’t remember them all. If your goal is to sleep with 100 or more women then so be it, but don’t overestimate what those notches will do for your life. I thought that once I hit that number, I would feel eternally happy and confi- dent, but just one day after this grand achievement, I felt no different than before. It was like having a great birthday party and then going back to normal life the following day. The journey I took to get those notches definitely changed me, but the 100th girl I had sex with did not. I don’t even remember her name. I imagine that I felt similar to men who climb high mountains. When a man makes it to the top of Mount Everest, he feels intensely happy and has a sense of accomplishment that lasts for days, but once 17  GAME that feeling fades he’s the same person with the same problems as before. His achievement becomes a pleasant memory that fades over time. The problem with some goals is that upon achieving them, you immediately want more to keep getting higher highs. A more sustainable goal is one that, once you’ve attained it, you don’t necessarily want more of it, and are instead content with your accomplishment and what it gave you, ready to move on to life’s next challenge. The healthiest way to approach game is to see it as a tool, not a lifestyle. Aim to attain a level of competency where you feel confi- dent in your ability to meet an attractive girl in order to have a relationship of some kind. You should be able to do this without feeling the need to compare your results to those of other men for the sake of alleviating an insecurity. Game should be a tool you can use whenever you need it, not a ball and chain that you have to drag around. If I’m seeing a girl and she satisfies my needs for sex and intima- cy, I don’t approach other girls. If I’m not seeing a girl and I’m developing a strong urge for sex or intimacy, I will start a new campaign and approach nearly every day. My first few approaches when re-entering the game are rusty, but my training will kick in and put me back in the groove. After getting a girl who satisfies my needs, I stop approaching and enjoy the relationship as long as it lasts. If the relationship ends, I wait until I strongly crave another woman and then start a new campaign. It took me over a decade to adopt this simple habit of pursuing women only when I need to. It’s the healthiest and most balanced way to run game, because it ensures that game is your slave rather than you becoming a slave to game. To achieve competent game, focus on the modest goal of ten lays (or even fewer if you consider yourself a fast learner), and maintain a high level of awareness during the learning process so that you can extract valuable lessons that will help you in your future dealings with women, even if the environment changes drastically. How many approaches does it take to get one lay? What is a good number? It depends on where you live, your overall value, the value of the girls you approach, the style of game you use, your personality, and the venues you approach in. If you’re using internet game, you may have to contact more than 200 girls to get one lay. If you’re 18  INTRODUCTION TO GAME running game during a ladies’ night at a club, where it’s likely there’ll be far more girls than guys, you may need to do only five approaches to get one lay. What matters is not whether your bang number compares favora- bly with that of other men, but whether it’s a number you can achieve in a reasonable amount of time without getting so frustrated that you quit. If the number is 60, and you’re fine with doing two approaches a day for one month until you get lucky, it doesn’t matter if another man claims to get laid with every few girls he approaches. When you start your training, you’ll be very conscious of how much effort you’re putting in, such as doing a certain number of approaches per week, but once you become more competent you can tailor your workload to fit the circumstances. For example, while training you may have to approach when you’re not in the mood, but once you’ve completed your training you can take long breaks from game and focus on other things, because you will have internalized important concepts that can be activated if an attractive girl you want to meet happens to cross your path. After training, you can also pursue niches or experiments that won’t necessarily have a high chance of helping your game. For example, you may want to see what happens to your game when you grow a one-foot-long beard that makes you look like a Muslim terrorist, something that I’ve done in the past. At this point, if your need for sex is not strong, you may be think- ing, “Why bother? This is too much work, and it sounds difficult.” It is indeed a lot of work, definitely more than our male ancestors had to put in. If you’re not convinced that you need game to get laid, you won’t put in the effort required to become competent at it. I suspect that you’re reading this book because you already have such a burning desire to get laid that putting in work is the least of your concerns, but if having sex with women is not one of your top priorities, I don’t have any argument that will change your mind. The main danger facing men when they start out in the game is becoming discouraged and giving up on women entirely, or taking the shortcut of using prostitutes. The problem with paying for sex is that it affects your mentality over time in such a way that it can prevent you from ever using normal game again. It’s hard to turn back from handing over cash to women you want to have sex with to doing, say, 19  GAME five approaches in a park. Once your brain associates sex with cash payments, and you interact with enough prostitutes to develop the impression that all women are “whores,” your ability to have standard relationships is compromised. At the same time, men who have not had sex for a year or longer should not be denied a way to alleviate their suffering. This is likely to apply to the 10% of men who are at the bottom of the attractiveness and social scale. Even in this case, men should use prostitutes only as emergency relief, perhaps once or twice a year. For men who want to have a normal sex life while learning enough about female nature to ensure strong long-term relationships, a goal of ten notches within three years is reasonable, assuming that many of these notches will lead to at least a short-term relationship. If you’re having sex with a girl only once, three sex acts a year won’t give you much satisfaction. Ten notches in three years will keep you involved in the game, teach you the true nature of women, and give you the sexual and emotional experience to maintain longer relationships, all while keeping you away from the more addictive aspects of wanting to sleep with a lot of women simply for physical pleasure or to boost your ego. If you’re a complete newbie who has never even kissed a girl, it will help if you add intermediary goals to keep you motivated. This may mean setting a goal of getting a certain number of phone numbers, and then a certain number of kisses. Once you hit ten notches, or if you’ve already hit it, you can set your own goals based on your needs and what you’ve learned. For many men, this means refining their game further to get more with less effort, or going deeper with more fulfilling relationships. This book will help with both, but understand that the more experience you accumulate, the more soul-searching and careful thinking you’ll have to do in order to determine exactly how you should proceed, particu- larly in a rapidly changing culture where a fun goal yesterday, such as hitting a hundred notches, may be a bad goal today because of relentless “rape culture” hysteria. Once you’ve gained a certain amount of experience, the only man who will be able to give you advice on how to proceed will be yourself, simply because it will be hard to find anyone else who has a similar life and game trajectory as you. 20  INTRODUCTION TO GAME That’s the situation I’m in. I’m 39 and have worn myself out from sleeping with promiscuous girls, and think more about experiencing fatherhood. What man out there can give me a clear recipe for what to do next? If I seek advice from men who haven’t been through what I’ve experienced, what can they say that will be worth listening to? The more you are in a later stage of the game, the more you’re on your own. I’ll be able to hold your hand for part of the journey, but at some point you’ll have to decide the best path to take. Whatever path you choose, and whether you want to be a player for life or a faithful husband and father, you cannot avoid having to understand women and how game works on them. This book is for the modern man, young or old, in whatever stage of life he finds himself in. 21  Chapter 2: Internal Game What does it really take to succeed at the game? Effort. You need to put in the work by placing yourself in the company of women and speaking to them. Knowledge is also important. Unless you want to reinvent game from scratch by doing 10,000 approaches, you need to have a good idea of what to do. Being motivated, living in a city with lots of girls, and having a favorable living situation (logistics) will also help, but the most important factor for game success is some- thing you cannot see or touch. It’s an invisible force embedded in your mind that controls you every second of the day. It’s your belief system. Your beliefs determine your behavior. Tell me what a man thinks, and I’ll tell you what he fears and what he desires. I’ll tell you his past, describe his present, and predict his future. Tell me a man’s beliefs and I’ll tell you who that man is. Beliefs are the fuel that propel a man in this direction or that, which is why if you have the power to shape a man’s beliefs, you have the power to shape the world. This is why governments have mastered the art of propaganda, to mold the beliefs of citizens who will then obey laws and authority. Our goal is not to dominate the world but the self. Either we allow external forces to install beliefs into our heads, without us even knowing it, or we consciously install beliefs that will allow us to accomplish our personal goals. If you’re hopeless when it comes to women, chances are you believe the opposite of what you should. If you have achieved varying success with women, you may possess some, or most, of the correct beliefs. These beliefs not only include what you think about women, but also what you think about yourself. It is often the case that the biggest obstacle to success in any area of life is having negative beliefs, often called “self-limiting” beliefs. Without even knowing it, 22  INTERNAL GAME men sabotage their lives by nurturing beliefs that lead them away from their goals. Adopting a belief is not a simple matter of reading it in a book, agreeing with it, and then getting on with your day. A belief is like a seed that must be sown and nurtured so that it will develop into a sturdy plant that will one day bear fruit. There are two ways to implant beliefs. The first is through regular study. After learning a belief, make notes on it and revisit the notes often. Another option, and one that I recommend, is to have a daily or weekly affirmation session where you repeat each belief to yourself between five to ten times, preferably out loud. Affirmations can also include motivational statements that encourage your work ethic and persistence, or any other area of your life that you want to improve. I’ll share more about affirmation sessions after discussing the beliefs. The following seven beliefs are essential to being good with wom- en. Don’t worry about memorizing them now—you’ll have plenty of opportunities to tackle them later, one or two at a time, as you ramp up your game efforts. “I don’t care if I get laid with her, but I do care about getting laid.” This belief is related to the expression “Don’t put pussy on the pedestal,” which you’ve probably heard in the context of advice that women don’t like needy men who drool over them. The second you show intense interest in a girl, at a level above the interest she is showing in you, it’s nearly guaranteed that you won’t ever sleep with her. That near guarantee becomes unbreakable when you are rejected outright but continue to fawn over a girl in the hope of convincing her that she should be with a needy man. I still get a lot of emails from men who want to know how they can get that one special, amazing, beautiful, perfect girl who already rejected them. These men think that if they don’t get her, they will never meet another great girl. This scenario forms the premise of many Hollywood movies, which train men to be spineless glops of emotion when it comes to romance. The reality is that being “roman- tic,” needy, and desperate doesn’t work today, so you must be 23  GAME convinced that you don’t care whether or not you succeed with an individual girl, even if you develop feelings for her. On the other hand, it takes genuine effort and time to meet a desir- able woman and date her. If we take “Don’t put pussy on the pedestal” to its logical conclusion, we will be monks living in caves who don’t care about being with any woman. The correct belief is not to care whether or not you lay a specific girl, but to care strongly about getting laid in general. You want to be the guy who steps into the bar wanting to get laid more than any other man, but who absolutely does not care if your top choice rejects you. You’re sufficiently motivated to do what it takes to succeed, but you won’t let one girl impede your overall progress. Although you don’t want to fawn over a girl, you should try to escalate an interaction instead of waiting for her to put the moves on you. A girl is turned off when you like her more than she likes you, but she is turned on when she likes you and you show her that you’re not afraid to go after what you want. This is why we don’t give our attention to girls who treat us poorly, don’t return our text messages, or cancel dates. The ideal is to have a strong need to get laid with women in general, but zero hesitation to dump any girl who rejects you or doesn’t treat you in the way you want. I don’t care if I get laid by her, but I do care about getting laid. “A girl primarily evaluates my value based on how I treat her.” Many men get hung up on looks as the main factor that determines how girls will respond to them. While looks are definitely an important factor, and something you should optimize as girls become increasingly superficial, it’s only one of many factors that girls use to judge our overall value. After you’ve maximized your physical attractiveness, you’ll notice that what really determines your value to a girl is how you present yourself to her, which is something you can control, unlike your height or facial structure. A woman does not want to be with a man she thinks possesses lower value than her. She is hard-wired to date men who have a higher status level, but as you can imagine, it’s not easy for a woman to judge a man’s overall worth. They are forced to take shortcuts 24  INTERNAL GAME when determining value. If you know what their shortcuts are, you can hijack their value-judging system to achieve your desired result. Let’s imagine you are looking at two men and you want to know which one is richer. You’ll probably examine their homes or cars since you don’t have access to their bank statements. These are indirect ways of judging a man’s net worth, but because of credit and bank loans, the man with the bigger house and fancier car may, in fact, be poorer. How about if you wanted to judge the quality of a nightclub? You would look at reviews online or walk by on a weekend night. If you noticed a long line outside, you would assume that the party must be amazing for people to be willing to wait, but it’s possible that the bouncers were holding the line to give the appearance of popularity. We’re always looking for shortcuts to judge value, but they are far from reliable, and if I know what shortcut you are using to judge me by, I can fake it so that you think my value is higher than it actually is. Women also look for shortcuts to judge the overall worth of a man. Social proof is one, where they note whether other women are giving you their attention. Being interesting or funny is another, because they are signs of intelligence and therefore a high income. A far more important shortcut is how a woman evaluates your treatment of her. If a man does not treat a woman well, she concludes it’s because he knows his value is much higher than hers. He’s treating her poorly because he believes she’s “beneath” him. Therefore, a woman will be more attracted to a man who doesn’t constantly give her favorable attention. On the other hand, if a woman interacts with a man who is always complimenting her, doing favors, and buying gifts, she will conclude (rightly) that he must have lower value than her: “He prizes me and is constantly doing nice things for me because I’m too good for him.” She will then make the logical decision not to pursue a relationship with him. Even men use this shortcut. If there is a girl who is showing you a lot of affection, much more than average, you will wonder why she’s so desperate, or whether there’s something wrong with her. Not only will you be hesitant to pursue her, but it’s also more likely that you’ll treat her poorly. You will skip out on replying to some of her texts, be slower to please her with stories or jokes, and be quicker to say no if 25  GAME she asks you for a favor. Without consciously thinking about it, your mind assigns a value to her and you treat her accordingly. Here’s the fascinating part: you get to choose what your value is when you interact with a girl who doesn’t know you. Unless she has heard of you from others, she has no idea what your value is before you start talking to her. Depending on how you treat her, and how you present yourself through your body language, you have an incredible amount of control to shape her value judgment. If I walk up to a girl in a bar with my shoulders hunched, and I start telling her how I want to buy her gifts because she’s so beautiful, she’ll judge my worth as lower than hers, but if I walk up to that same girl with my body erect and show that her beauty doesn’t have an effect on me, while throwing in a joke that girls usually buy me drinks, she may judge my worth to be at least equal to hers. In both approaches, I’m technically the same man, but I’ll receive two completely different responses, only one of which will open the possibility of taking her to bed. The catch is that it’s not easy to be aloof when approaching a beautiful girl if you’re inexperienced around women or have low confidence. This belief can become a reality only once you begin to succeed with prettier women as your game progresses. When a woman allows you to converse with her after a successful opener, how she judges your value is mostly in your hands. If you believe that your value is higher than hers, even if it objectively isn’t, how will she know otherwise? A girl primarily evaluates my value based on how I treat her. “Every time I fail, I take one big step towards success.” Failure is a subjective phenomenon that, like the previous belief, lies mostly within your realm of control. For anything that is a “failure,” you can easily identify lessons that will not only make you stronger, but also increase the chances that you’ll succeed in the future. Let’s say that I get rejected by a girl in an embarrassing way. Automatically, I start feeling bad by dwelling on negative thoughts. “She thinks I’m a loser… I’m so ugly that she doesn’t want to have 26  INTERNAL GAME anything to do with me… She thinks I’m scum of the Earth.” Even if these thoughts are mostly accurate, a universal fact is that it takes an unknown amount of failures to achieve a single success. Statistically, being rejected actually makes success more likely, as long as you keep going. Once you realize that you’ve probably learned something new from a failed approach, you can clearly see that rejection and failure are absolutely necessary to succeed. No one succeeds on their first try, and if they did, they’d have no idea what they did right to duplicate it in the future. In order for you to be consistently good with women, you must be rejected enough times until you learn what works for you and what doesn’t while shedding the fear of rejection that all humans are born with. The best strategy is to embrace rejection as an essential step on the road to success. If you don’t accept this, you won’t succeed with women. Having a goal of never being rejected is not only unreasona- ble, but will lead to total failure. You may see rejection as uncomfortable and painful, but you have full control over how to interpret that rejection. Why not interpret it as an essential ingredient to accomplishing your goals? Rejection is a natural barrier to separate the men who truly want to succeed from those who don’t. With each interaction, try your best to nudge a woman as far as she will go until it’s absolutely clear that she’s not interested, because if you exit too early, before the real rejection comes, you’re not experiencing rejection at all. The rejection must be real for it to put you closer to success. I’ve talked to many girls who didn’t have sex with me. Instead of being upset, I’m thankful they were part of the number of failures the universe required from me before I could experience a sexual success. Another benefit is that every time a girl rejects you, you learn a vital piece of the puzzle to becoming a stronger man. While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that you should experience a life of rejection, only adversity and rejection can strengthen a man, not success and comfort. The more setbacks you have suffered in life, the stronger you are and the more you’re able to deal with difficult situations and problems. It’s when life is a bit too easy, when I’m not experiencing difficulties, that I know I’m getting weaker. When you get rejected enough times, you start to build a solid data 27  GAME set of what works and what doesn’t for your unique personality, vibe, and environment. If you’re failing soon after the approach, you know that you have to adjust your look, opener, or the type of girl you’re approaching. If you can get a lot of phone numbers, but girls don’t respond to your first message, you know that you have to strengthen the connection you make when meeting them. If you’re getting girls back to your apartment, but they won’t sleep with you, you know that you have to raise a girl’s level of comfort and trust at the key moment of intimacy. Rejection provides you with feedback about where specifically you need to improve so that you can move forward. Failure is like a trail of bread crumbs that tells you where to focus your efforts, but sometimes it’s hard to know exactly where the trail is leading, because we can’t isolate for variables as in a laboratory experiment. When we’re running game, it’s not always clear whether there is one big thing we’re doing wrong or several things we’re doing slightly wrong. There will also be cases where you’re not doing anything wrong at all, but your standards are just too high. Even if you can’t find anything specific to learn from a rejection, the fact that you did get rejected desensitizes you from future rejections, strengthening your mental core. This is why some psychologists recommend “rejection therapy” to clients with self- esteem problems. Paradoxically, getting rejected builds your confi- dence, because you learn that you’re not made of glass that will shatter when something doesn’t go your way. Failure is an important step on the road to success, and something you should embrace and learn from. Every time I fail, I take a big step towards success. “It’s fun to try new things just to see what happens.” This is one of my favorite beliefs, because it instills a playful and curious mindset that allows you to develop a game that is tailor-made for you. Having the belief that you want to see what will happen if you try something new is the only way you can customize your game. When I was about 12 years old, I bought a science kit and started doing experiments with chemicals in my bedroom. I so enjoyed mixing the chemicals to see what the result would be that I eventually chose a career of microbiology. That career didn’t quite work out, 28  INTERNAL GAME because it was more about sitting in meetings and following orders than discovering new things, but the curiosity mindset has stayed with me. If I do this thing, what will be the result? How will a beautiful girl respond if I ask her, “Can you even read?” How will my body respond if I don’t eat for twenty-four hours straight? If I change one ingredient in a bread recipe, how will it affect the taste? Curiosity leads to experimentation. For example, I may be curious whether a certain opening line will work, so I try it out on several different girls. If the line gets a more favorable response than one I’ve used before, or it gets the same response but I’m way more motivated to use it, I now have a new line in my game repertoire. The process will repeat as I get curious about trying other lines, moves, or changes to my appearance that may improve my results. I’m sure I have some genetic wiring that makes me naturally curi- ous, but if you don’t, you’ll have to implant the curiosity belief in your mind to encourage experimentation. If you’re not curious, you will get stuck when you encounter problems. You’ll be a mini-Roosh when you start out using the foundational game I teach, but very soon thereafter you can adapt that foundation to make it work better for you. A lack of curiosity will prevent you from doing so. Mimicking another guy’s game can get you started, but it won’t allow you to match his results. When I was living in Odessa, Ukraine, I met a man who was doing very well with online dating. He showed me his lines and I copied them word-for-word to use on girls, but I got less than 20% of the positive responses he did. The reason is that those lines were optimized for his pictures, personality, and taste in women. I’m not a fan of internet game, but if I truly wanted to get good at it, I’d use existing material as a starting point and adapt it over time to fit my look, vibe, body language, humor, taste, and so on. While there are universal game strategies that will work for all men, that universality decreases as you get more granular into word- for-word lines and routines. The ones I teach are more universal than most, but understand that the words you use must eventually suit your personality and the environment you’re in. Whenever a guru teaches you how to do anything, what he’s really teaching you is what worked for him. You must possess the curious mindset to adapt my teachings to your situation as you gain more experience. Unfortunately, modern culture has launched a war on curiosity and 29  GAME experimentation. Corporations are eager to provide you with ready- made solutions to your problems that don’t require thinking or customization. Many people enjoy shiny gadgets and porn that meet their need for entertainment and sex without having to expend any effort. The culture has not given you the tools to overcome the challenge of getting laid, and has allowed your curiosity to atrophy. We have to activate it, which won’t be hard, because most humans are naturally curious. Be curious, because it’s fun to try new things just to see what happens. Your sex life will thank you for it. “I will invest my time only in girls who add value to my life.” Men who don’t have much experience with women, and whose views on them have been shaped by movies and television, may have the misconception that women are capable of making them happy. To understand what role women play in our happiness, we must first define what happiness is. As defined by mainstream culture, happiness is a feeling of bliss where life is great, nothing bad is happening to you, your consumer products are functioning as they should, and you are pleased with your body, job, apartment, social interactions, friends and family, love life, hobbies, and the restaurants near your home. When someone asks us “Are you happy?” we’re supposed to either answer that every part of our lives is wonderful or that everything is not great, we’re not happy, and because we’re not happy, we’re suffering in some way and must immediately make a change so that, when the next person asks us whether we’re happy, we can enthusiastically say “Yes.” The problem with this idea of happiness is that it doesn’t correctly identify happiness as a transient emotion that depends on external conditions. The first day you’re in your brand-new luxury car, you feel a rush of happiness. The 180th day you’re in the same car, you don’t even notice you have a luxury car, and simply want to make it to work on time. The first night you move into your loft penthouse, you imagine all the parties you will throw in it. The 180th day you’re in the penthouse, you see it merely as a comfortable place to live. While the car and the penthouse make you content in that you would rather have them than not, they eventually stop providing you 30  INTERNAL GAME with a positive emotional feeling. The result is something more like satisfaction. Once happiness subsides, your mind returns to focusing on your insecurities and troubles, and you start aching for something new to alleviate them. New and exciting things will make you happy only for the short term. I see this phenomenon when I’m in Eastern Europe and meet male travelers who are there for the first time. I already know what they’re going to say to me after their first week: “There are hot girls every- where—this is amazing!” I smile and remember my first time in Eastern Europe when I felt like a kid in a candy store, but years later I barely notice the beautiful women all around me. The reason is that I’ve adapted, and you cannot get happiness from something you’ve adapted to, only contentment. The problem is that humans are designed to adapt to everything, so shaping your life around some- thing that you think makes you happy, without considering its cost or the process of adaptation, will put you on a never-ending roller- coaster ride of happy peaks and frustrating dips. If I give you a great girl today, you will experience high levels of happiness because of the pleasant novelty, but soon you’ll be reminded of all the other things that make you unhappy, because a great girl cannot put you in a state of permanent happiness where you don’t experience problems, insecurities, desires, or worries. A girl can make you temporarily forget all the things you’re unhappy about, but often you will bring your existing problems into a new relationship. The best sign that you’ll be happy in any relationship is that you’re happy while not in a relationship. This is not to say that a girl can’t add value to your life. She can add companionship, intimacy, sex, humor, and children, all while reducing boredom. You can have experiences with a girl that you can’t have while alone, and some of these are pleasant and make life fun. A girl is certainly capable of improving your overall content- ment, but there’s a catch: not every girl out there can provide you with positive value. Many girls, because of their own problems, yield negative value, and will make your life worse if you get into a long- term relationship with them. Consider that girls have more mental issues and insecurities than you, and think far more illogically. Whatever benefits they provide must be weighed up against the fact that they are the weaker sex and 31  GAME need additional care, monitoring, and maintenance. While your standards shouldn’t be sky high if you only want to have sex with a girl, you should be careful of which girl you choose for a monoga- mous long-term relationship, because the wrong girl can make your life worse. Only a man who understands what happiness is, and how transient it can be, will not rush into a relationship with a girl who is not right for him. I’ll have sex with the most attractive girl I can find, but I’ll only pursue a relationship with a girl who adds value to my life in a tangible way. Does she treat me with respect? Does she not create constant problems? Does she satisfy me sexually? Does she have good family values? Does she have homemaking skills? Unless I can answer yes to all of these questions, I won’t pursue more than a sexual fling. If she is the right match, I will enter a relationship with the understanding that whatever mental or other problems I had before the relationship will be brought into the relationship. A girl, even a great one, is not a magical cure for my issues, so I will invest my time only in girls who add value to my life, and stay away from the ones who don’t. “I ultimately choose how a girl treats me.” No girl can treat you in a way that you don’t accept. The only way a girl can disrespect you, cause drama, or abuse you is if you give her permission to do so. This starts early in the interaction. Think back to the last time a girl canceled a date on you at the last minute. Did you make a comment about her wasting your time, or did you show that the cancelation was no big deal to you? If you did the latter, you indirectly told her that it’s okay for her not to value your time, and that if she disrespects you again in the future, she will not be punished for it. A man may wonder why a girl keeps canceling on him without realizing that he’s allowing her to do it. Little acts of disrespect, if not squashed early on, will morph into bigger acts of disrespect later. This is why it’s so important that you insist on being treated properly from the very beginning, even if this may cause you to lose out on sex. The hornier you are, the more likely you will accept disrespect 32  INTERNAL GAME from a woman, because you’re allowing your phallus to overpower decisions that your mind wants to make. When I was thirstier for sex, I accepted all manner of flaking, sarcastic jokes, and inane feminist comments from girls, hoping I’d get laid anyway. If I didn’t get the lay, I’d feel like crap because I had let a girl treat me poorly and got nothing out of it. If I did get the lay, I’d still feel slightly like crap because I had sacrificed my self-respect to get an orgasm or two. As long as you’re not strict like an army drill master and freak out if a girl merely looks at her phone on a date, you should walk away from girls who are treating you in a way that you don’t deserve. If you don’t, you’ll feel degraded. If I had listened to the advice I’m giving you now, I’d have gained fewer notches with girls who provided me with nothing but forgetta- ble sex. I now stop girls when they behave disrespectfully, and firmly but politely tell them that I do not accept being spoken to or treated in a negative way. If they don’t stop, the interaction ends. If they do stop, we can continue to build our connection. It’s tempting to lament that a girl is not behaving in the way you want, but as long as you choose to continue interacting with her, you have only yourself to blame. If a girl walks away from you after you’ve told her to stop her demeaning behavior, I guarantee that you have been saved from a lot of headache in the future from someone who is more likely to subtract value from your life than add to it. I ultimately choose how a girl treats me. “If she pushes me away, I must pull away.” If there is one consistent way to kill any attraction a girl has for you, it’s to respond to her actions that push you away by giving her even more attention. Girls are far more sensitive than men when it comes to knowing where the power resides in an interaction, which means that you must never respond to her apathy or disinterest with attention or affection. You must match her apathy with greater apathy. You must match her long text reply times with even longer reply times. You must match her disinterest with even greater disinterest. By pulling away when she increases her distance from you, you’ll 33  GAME pass all the tests a girl does to see whether or not the man she’s interacting with is weak. Girls take small, barely perceptible steps away from you during an interaction to see whether or not she has you firmly in her pocket. When you respond by taking a step away yourself, you “pass” the test. As a result, she recognizes that you have genuine value. Remember that it’s very difficult for a girl to judge a man’s true value, so she has to see how he will treat her to get an assessment she can act on. If a man has high value, and a girl beneath his value pushes him away, what do you think he will do? He will begin looking at other girls. If he leans into her instead, she will perceive that his value is low and decide she is too good for him. Pulling away from a girl who is being cold helps to train your subconscious that your value is high, because only a high-value man can walk away from an attractive girl. You also save a ton of time, because girls who pull away tend to have lower interest in you than girls who don’t. You will have better experiences with girls who don’t play many games before they allow you to bed them. If a girl pushes you away, and she doesn’t respond positively after you pull away in response, she’s not testing you: she’s really not interested. If a girl likes a man, she won’t do too many things that will cause him to lose hope of getting her. She will play “hard to get” mainly in the bedroom when you want to seal the deal, but usually not before that when you’re having a conversation, getting her phone number, or setting up the first date. A girl who is interested in you will not want to lose you, so she will continually give out encouragement and positive signs. If you’re not getting these signs, and she doesn’t dive back into you after you pull away in response to her cold behavior, she simply isn’t interest- ed. If she pushes me away, I must pull away. Implanting Beliefs Through Auto-Suggestion The seven beliefs above will help you to internalize the mindset you need to be successful with women, not only in casual relation- ships, but also in long-term relationships with women you want to have a family with. Even if you stop reading this book right now, as 34  INTERNAL GAME long as these beliefs become fixed in your mind, you will be able to develop behaviors for attracting and managing women. The problem is getting them into your brain and keeping them there, particularly if you’ve believed their opposites for most of your life. When I started with game, I approached girls at least three times a week. I was so obsessed with game that it became my career, making it easy for the right beliefs to stay in my head. Most men, however, are unable or unwilling to dedicate the same amount of time to game as I have, so they need a technique that takes into account the limited amount of time they practice game each week. If you see a girl you like but haven’t run game in a while, the beliefs must be fresh in your mind so you can approach competently with only a slight amount of hesitation. One strategy to accomplish this is auto-suggestion. Auto-suggestion is a method of repeating statements to yourself regularly so that they become implanted in your subconscious. The easiest way to do this is to repeat a handful of beliefs or affirmations daily or weekly, and then add or remove beliefs when necessary. For example, imagine that you are an athlete who wants to compete in the Olympics. You may repeat these three auto-suggestions every day before training: 1. Your daily work will make you a champion. You will work harder today than anyone else. 2. The difficulties you face today make you stronger, while any comfort you choose makes you weaker. 3. If it were easy, everyone would be doing it. You will avoid what is easy and push to your genetic limits of endurance. These three auto-suggestions are designed to motivate the athlete to embrace a rigorous training regimen. A starter program can include one session a day where you repeat each auto-suggestion five to ten times (preferably out loud) while in a relaxed state. To not overload your brain, I recommend a maximum of eight auto-suggestions (an ideal number for me is closer to five). Let’s say I’m a reader of this book and want to program my mind with the seven game beliefs. The first step is to write the beliefs I 35  GAME need to embrace on a piece of paper or type them up in a computer file. Find a quiet space and breathe deeply ten times. Take the first belief and read it out loud between five to ten times. Then breathe deeply five times while imagining yourself executing the belief in a particular scenario. Repeat these steps with the other beliefs. When you’ve gone through the entire list, breathe deeply ten more times. The whole exercise will take only a few minutes. If you’re feeling relaxed and loose after the session, it’s because you’ve put yourself in a mildly hypnotic state that accelerated the incorporation of the beliefs into your subconscious. You’re probably thinking, “Does this really work?” At a minimum, it will prevent you from forgetting the most important concepts that you want to focus on. When you encounter a situation that is related to one of the beliefs, you will react more quickly with the correct behavior. Other signs that it’s working are that thoughts about a belief pop into your mind during the course of the day or you start dreaming about putting a belief into action. Once you’ve incorporated a belief into your thinking, take it off your list. You can add it back later if the bad behavioral pattern it was supposed to correct reappears. Your auto-suggestion list will be continually updated by adding or removing beliefs and affirmations depending on the challenges you need to overcome. For example, at the time of this writing, my auto-suggestion list is based on the fact that I am re-entering the game after a long relationship. The problem is that I’ve lost my killer instinct because I haven’t had to approach women for so long. Here are the three auto-suggestions I’ve been using: 1. The best thing you can do today is get brutally rejected by at least one girl. 2. You are a hunter with a track record of consistent success. Now go do what a successful hunter must do. 3. You’re not in a relationship anymore, so stop being a pussy. It’s time to be masculine again. The first auto-suggestion is tied to my commitment to approach 36  INTERNAL GAME one girl a day, a tactic I will discuss later. I included the word “brutally” because I want to do high-risk approaches that may have a high reward. The second one is meant to give me confidence by reminding me of my past success. It also encourages me to embrace a “hunter” identity that I want to see myself as. The final auto- suggestion is aimed at getting me out of relationship mode, where I was bathed in comfort and took no risks. These three auto-suggestions have been customized to suit me, my current situation, and the goals I want to achieve in the short term. They will change within a few weeks as I progress. I’m always ready to update my list whenever I hit a new obstacle that is hindering me. I suggest that you start with broad beliefs that are new to you, and then add customized auto-suggestions over time that motivate you to take action daily. Chapter Conclusion As effective as auto-suggestions are, they aren’t enough on their own to elicit the desired behavior. You need to act to forge connec- tions between the beliefs and reality. Since the proper beliefs will come anyway from experience alone, the purpose of using auto- suggestions is to speed the process along, motivate you, and give you the feeling that you know what you’re doing. Even if you can do only one auto-suggestion session a week instead of every day, your mind will absorb the beliefs faster than if you didn’t do any sessions at all. When you’re satisfied with the results of your game work and how your relationships are going, you can drop the sessions entirely, and do them only if you need a minor check-up to address a specific problem. In the past, I believed that internal game wasn’t important, and that a man should simply dive in and approach a lot of girls. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I now believe that giving your mind a “tune up” before you start will improve your results. Remember: your beliefs drive your behavior. You cannot behave in an optimal or ideal way if you have the wrong beliefs. Once you get your mind fully on board with the game work you want to do, you’ll have a much easier time. Study the correct beliefs, understand 37  GAME why you should believe them, and make up your own auto- suggestions that are tailored to your environment and help motivate you to act correctly. With internal game out of the way, we can now focus on the con- crete physical changes we make to ourselves that have a direct impact on attracting girls. 38  Chapter 3: Pre-Game Many men mistakenly think that game is simply about walking outside, finding the first attractive girl, and saying a handful of lines that will make her panties wet, but your lines are only a small part of what girls use when assessing your value. In the past, I focused more on my approach frequency and the quality of my lines, but now I see the benefit of improving myself to the extent that I can use less game. If you make the most of your genetic potential in a way that is attractive to girls, you may need only a touch of game to get the girls you want. The areas that are most worth improving are your physical health, appearance, and hygiene. Biological Functioning Are you healthy? Is your weight under control? How are your energy levels and vitality? With so many harmful chemicals in the environment, it’s likely that your physical well-being, particularly your testosterone levels, is being negatively affected. Do a web search on “testosterone decline” and you will see that this hormone, which is the most important one for peak male performance, is on a worldwide decline thanks to estrogenic compounds in our food and other consumer products. Another reason for the decrease is unhealthy lifestyle choices that stem from sitting for extended periods, eating badly, not getting enough sleep, and forgoing weight resistance training. Testosterone is the main reason you’re a man. It is what makes men men. Your aggression, strength, energy, and mood are tied to having the appropriate concentration of this hormone. Low testos- terone can result in a lower sex drive and mood disorders that make you feel like you’re going through menopause. Your game success 39  GAME rate depends largely on you having a normal amount of testosterone. Starting a game program with inadequate testosterone is similar to a runner starting a marathon with asthma or a leg injury. Even if you’re relatively young, I recommend that you have your testosterone level checked, either by visiting your physician or by contacting a laboratory. This will enable you to establish a baseline testosterone value. If, in a few years, you’re starting to experience symptoms that suggest a decline, you can get re-tested and compare the new value to your baseline. I regret that I was 35 when I had my testosterone checked for the first time. While the result was normal, I don’t know whether it has remained stable or has been decreasing since my twenties. Low testosterone can also cause a lack of interest in women. I remember how insanely motivated I was to approach girls when I first started using game, even though I didn’t know what I was doing. The hornier you are, the less anxious you’ll be about rejection, simply because you’re so energized to get laid. I suspect that men who have above-average levels of anxiety, and who can’t make themselves do an approach after weeks of trying, have low testosterone. If a test confirms that this is the case, these men can start to remedy the problem through exercise, a correct diet, vitamin and mineral supplementation, adequate sleep, and other lifestyle changes. I don’t recommend testosterone replacement therapy except in extreme cases, because it results in pharmaceutical dependency and won’t solve the root of the problem. Testosterone levels may also be falling because few men engage in activities that require the hormone in the first place. We don’t hunt for our food, sire numerous children, conquer new lands, physically exert ourselves on farms, defend our family from barbarians, or face life- threatening situations. Why should our body send a signal to produce testosterone if we’re sitting on our butts all day staring at computer screens and walking a few feet to the refrigerator to retrieve prepared food? Men report that the most improvement to their horniness and energy results from lifting weights, probably because it mirrors the physical exertion our ancestors had to do. This suggests you must adopt behaviors that convince your mind the body needs testosterone. Trying to lay new girls helps, but it may not be enough. Once you’ve 40  PRE-GAME removed estrogen from your diet and environment, and adopted a more active lifestyle, convince your mind that you intend to repro- duce with women and need help in the form of a testosterone boost, even if you don’t want to be a father right now. Apart from boosting your testosterone, treat any lingering health problems that affect your energy level or ability to talk to girls. We all have untreatable flaws that we wish we didn’t have, but if something is treatable, you should start putting the time into fixing it right now. Consider yourself a sort of athlete. Before you step on the field, make sure you have no “injuries” or excess fat that may hamper your motivation or performance. Physical Appearance How you look has become more important over the years because girls are being culturally programmed to go for “sexy” and “hot” men who instantly turn them on. This programming starts when a girl is barely a teenager and is fed a nonstop stream of attractive male stars who are supposed to represent the archetype of the ideal man. In the past, simply making a bold display of confidence was enough to create attraction, but this is no longer the case. We have to compen- sate by allowing our physical appearance to create much of the attraction. I know that a lot of men are insecure about how they look. Even men I would describe as handsome think they’re ugly. It doesn’t help that certain dating apps force girls to evaluate you only on your looks, which has the effect of rewarding the top 10% of good-looking men—a group to which I do not belong. So yes, if you use the shallowest dating app, and you’re a six out of ten or worse on the looks scale, and you don’t put any effort into optimizing your appearance, you will see poor results that cause you to become discouraged and swear off game and women entirely. Once you step out of the looks-centered internet fishbowl, however, you will receive much better feedback from women. The correct strategy is to optimize your physical appearance as much as you can and then start talking to girls in venues where appearance is not the most important feature that determines your 41  GAME value. Instead of worrying about your physical flaws, focus on improving your overall look. Not only will you gain one or two points on the looks scale, but you’ll gain something far more important: confidence. It’s confidence that will ensure you do the required number of approaches, without which you won’t succeed. We all have our insecurities when it comes to how we look. When I look in the mirror, I see that my chin is uneven, my ears are huge, and one of my eyes is open wider than the other, but these flaws haven’t prevented me from having sexual relationships with attractive women. Based on the amount of sex I’ve had, whatever problems I’ve perceived with my appearance existed primarily in my mind. My appearance was less of a problem than low self-esteem. When you don’t think highly of yourself, you search for excuses to prevent yourself from taking risks that may confirm the low opinion you’ve created. You are your own worst critic. It won’t take more than 25 ap- proaches for you to realize that your negative fantasies of how you’ll be treated by women don’t match reality. Experience is the only reliable cure to smashing low self-esteem, because your mind will be forced to modify its incorrect beliefs. Your mind is both your friend and your enemy, because while it gives you the cognitive ability to fulfill your goals, it also tells you that you are ugly and will experience nonstop rejection. The first step is to get over your physical flaws and work on improving your overall appearance. Imagine for a second how a warrior in the ancient past must have appeared. You may have in your mind a man who is strong, big, and mean looking, but I guarantee he was also dirty, smelly, and hairy. While girls today want a strong man, they also want one who smells good and brushes his teeth daily, unlike an ancient warrior. Most girls now prefer a man who is somewhat like a cat: clean, hygienic, and well groomed. In other words, girls want men who are like gay men of a few decades ago when it comes to grooming habits. Girls generally want masculine men, but ones who don’t stink or have forests growing on the back of their necks. To present yourself as attractive to the modern girl, you’ll have to groom at a level that is more feminine than masculine, but this is what gets the best respons- es. 42  PRE-GAME Many of the men I’ve met who have had great success with wom- en don’t appear hyper-masculine. They pay close attention to their appearance and have a chatty personality where they’re able to talk to girls endlessly about any topic. Of course, a hyper-masculine man doesn’t have trouble getting girls (imagine a confident body builder), but a lot of girls simply want a well-groomed man who knows how to arouse her emotionally with language. This is particularly true in large, cosmopolitan cities, where the gap between masculine and feminine is much narrower than it is in rural or traditional areas. A girl in New York City, for example, is going to demand men who are more groomed compared to a girl who lives on a farm in Russia. The more urban and modern your environment, the more likely women will prefer a man who puts extra care into his appearance. If a grooming task is making you feel weird, it could be a sign that you should skip it. Everything you do to improve your appearance should also make you more energized to talk to women. If you feel a decrease in confidence upon doing an optimization step, pass on it for the time being. Managing Your Body Hair Hairy men used to rule the world, but not anymore. Most women now prefer men who are nearly as hairless as they are. This has made my life slightly challenging, because I’m one of the hairiest men I know. I have nose hair, ear hair, neck hair, shoulder hair, back hair, butt hair, and even toe hair. Your goal should not be to remove all the hair from your body, but to get rid of the most objectionable hair that is visible before intimacy occurs. In the case of the areas where it’s not bad to have hair, such as our face and chest, we only need to maintain a desirable length. Nose hair is the first area to examine. When looking in the mirror, can you see any hair that is trying to escape your nasal cavity? If you can, get rid of it with a nose trimmer. Then look at your ears. Is any hair growing on your earlobes, or in the ear canal? You can use your nose trimmer to remove it. Eyebrows are next. If you have a long, caterpillar-like unibrow, you should remove the hair in the middle to ensure you have two