Pickup Tech

If you meet a girl or have a date, but you use a tactic too long or too many times, the tactic “inflates” – i.e., turns stale. How can you avoid stale tactics? By using a tactics timer.

This is a little technique I developed for myself to guard against inflation.

As a refresher: any time you use a certain tactic too long, it becomes 'inflated'. That is to say, you get predictable and things turn stale.

You can use this with any basic example. Imagine a guy talking to a girl who uses a good "That's what she said!" joke at an opportune time. The girl laughs. It's kind of cheesy, but also a little bit funny.

Three minutes later, he uses the exact same joke. Then another five minutes and he uses it again. Ten minutes after that, he tells her, "That's what she said!" yet again.

By this point, the joke is tired, stale, and inflated, and using it actually hurts the interaction because it feels like this guy has nothing else. He only has the few tricks he's been using, and while they might've felt fresh at first, that freshness is now long gone.

What are this guy's odds to hook up with the girl he's talking to? Not great, and getting lower by the minute. The more time he spends in inflation, the lower his odds become.

When you're learning, or you're rusty, you will tend to find yourself trapped in inflationary spirals at times. You'll realize you're getting boring, stale, and predictable... and then you can feel stuck.

You might start to panic a bit.

What can you do to escape, and salvage things with this girl?

The solution is to use tactics timers as a way to consciously avoid slipping into inflated interactions.

When you’re on the prowl, and you’re not sure a woman is sufficiently liberated for your purposes, what do you do with her? Well, you screen her… next her, if she doesn’t measure up… then return.

Here's a devious little tactic you can use in social circle settings or anywhere you have a 'captive audience'.

First off: this tactic is not so well suited to cold approach.

You can use it sometimes, in some cold approach scenarios, such as early on in a bar or nightclub (e.g., if you are doing shotgun opening / hit-and-run game).

But it is really best suited to situations where you are going to see a woman again and again.

You are going to use this tactic to get girls to get on-board with the way you want to seduce them or pick them up. It will both make compliant girls feel extra special, and make non-compliant girls become a lot more compliant (if not now, then in the future).

It's simple to do, but it takes some balls.

Want to optimize your seductions? Step 1: learn effective canned routine concepts. Step 2: “naturalize” those concepts to fit your personal approach and style.

Hey guys!

Last week, in response to a reader’s question, I detailed the pros and cons of using canned routines to seduce women.

To recap, the benefits of using scripted gambits are:

• You have well-thought-out techniques that have been tried and rehearsed by others designed to work at your disposal

• Others can try your routine, comment, add changes and tweaks. This benefits the community

• You have a working tool in your arsenal. You avoid talking for the sake of talking, and you can accomplish a specific goal with your words

• It can reduce your nervousness when opening since you have a well-tested routine or gambit that has worked in the past. You don’t have to rationalize for not opening because you don’t have a good opener. Now you have one

• Beginners especially can benefit from having clear guidelines for what works and what doesn’t in seduction. This is likely THE MOST important point

The cons:

• Even though gambits show you what to say, you may find yourself in a protracted interaction where you run out of gambits and are left with nothing to say

• The delivery can sometimes be artificial since it may not calibrate to you or your personality (probably why many men got seduced by the idea of “natural game” since it focuses on being more “you”). Guys can get stuck delivering a rehearsed script that mismatches the vibe of the interaction and the venue

• You have little flexibility; you end up stuck within the gambit

• Sometimes a magical gambit that worked 90% of the time will not work on a certain chick for whatever reason. (A dogmatic routine user would argue that you should learn more routines; a good solution, but it’s not the most effective, as we will see, and surely not the most pleasant)

• You may feel alienated from the material since it is not yours (the exception is when you create your own material, which more experienced seducers do, myself included!)

Last week I discussed these pros and cons while sharing some historical elements behind routine-based game and why it lost popularity.

However, I realized I did not present a solution to the problem. Is natural game the way to go? Or should you stick to routines? In my opinion, the answer lies somewhere in between. Ideally, we would like to gather as many of the benefits of routine-based game while keeping it natural. In other words, get the best of both worlds.

I want to present my view of “naturalized” game. I initially wrote a post titled “Naturalized Game” around 2008. It didn’t get much attention, partly because it was short and did not deliver anything mind-blowing then. I did not spend the time or effort to make a good, solid argument for my position. But I intend to do so today.

Note that I have stuck with naturalized game since that day.

Before I discuss what this concept is and how it works, I need to clarify a few ideas.

You have something sexual you want to tell a girl or show her, but it’s inappropriate. How do you get around its impropriety? By baiting her into begging you to share it with her.

Want a simple little tactic you can use to bait girls into asking you things you couldn't/wouldn't normally be able to get away with in conversation?

Because there are some things that you really cannot just come out and drop on a girl, without it being too forward or out-of-place.

The solution, if you want to use a really forward compliment or bring up or show her something really sketchy is to lure her into asking you for it, pushing you for it, so that when you finally drop it on her, "she asked for it."

With a little good framing, this is not hard to do at all.

Note: while this tactic is simple, it requires a fair degree of calibration, and thus its use is a bit more advanced. So this will mostly be for intermediate and up guys (and really is for more advanced seducers).

Beginners may still find it interesting to read about, if purely for the psychology aspect.

Canned game routines get a bad rep in the community since the natural game reaction. But are they really all that bad?

Hey guys. Welcome back.

On my second article about dealing with groups, DJM commented:

“Alek! Thanks for your great posts. Now that the mainstream pickup scene is filled with so much crap, it’s great that we have someone from the old school days still writing great content. I would really be grateful if you wrote a post about routines, gambits, and canned material. Nowadays, it’s taboo to mention routines or gambits in the community. You’re one of the few who still believes in and uses them. Please elaborate on how they can help – especially for beginners – and remove some of the stigma around them. Thanks a lot!!.”

Thank you for the kind words! Comments are what keep me motivated in doing the work I love: writing about pickup and seduction. So, thanks again.

Now, onto your request. As DJM implies, I think routines are misunderstood. What is a routine? In pickup and seduction, they’re ready-made techniques you can use as routines. The commentator is correct when he says there is a stigma surrounding them. It’s why we often prefer calling routines “gambits.”

In this post, I’ll discuss the pros and cons of using canned routines. Next week, I’ll explain my way of using routines, how they can benefit you, and how they can give you ALL THE PROS without THE CONS listed in this article.

First, I need to discuss some theories on why routines have such a bad rep.

Paradiastole is a technique for reframing criticism into trophies. That vice of yours? Hey, look on the bright side! At least it means you (something good). That’s paradiastole.

"You shouldn't say something like that to a woman!" a girl recently told me, half-tickled, half-irate. "It shows you have low EQ!"

"Well, least I'm honest," I said. "Just think how bad it'd be if I was low EQ and I wasn't honest!"

I use this kind of reframe a lot. There's a name for it: it's called 'paradiastole'.

(my EQ's pretty good, by the way)

Paradiastole is a way to reframe a criticism into something positive, in a playful and humorous way. It deflects the other person's judgment, often with a bit of moderate self-deprecation.

If you don't do this, or you don't do it enough, it's a handy little tactic you can add to your arsenal.

If you take her from the setting you seduced her in to one that’s very different, you risk disrupting your seduction. Keep an eye on environments as you pull/change venues.

One of the biggest mood-killers in a seduction is when the setting changes.

Every guy who's been around the seduction block has encountered this during transitions.

You meet a girl somewhere (let's say at a bar), and the vibe is great. She's connected with you, laughing with you, the flirtation is strong. There's a strong sexual vibe.

Then you take her out of there. You go to a diner. The two of you chill. The vibe comes down.

You head out onto the street to hail a ride back together. "You know what, I'm just going to go home I think," she tells you.

You try to get her to stick around: "No, no! The car's almost here. We'll just go back for 30 minutes. It'll be a great time, I promise."

But she bails anyway.

What happened?

You know (you could feel it) that if there'd been some way to shag this girl in the bar you met her at, she would absolutely have been yours.

However, there wasn't. You tried taking her to the diner, then home, and somewhere along the way things lost steam.

This will not always happen. Sometimes you can maintain the vibe across settings.

Nevertheless, if you want to maximize your odds to get the girl, keep the setting constant.