Yesterday I put up a daygame infield video up on YouTube showing me approaching and chatting to a blond Finnish girl in London.
Below I break down the interaction, explain what I was doing, and call out what I did well and what I did badly. Hopefully this will help you with your own interactions.
If you haven’t seen the video yet then watch it below before reading the rest of the article. And while you’re there, be sure to subscribe to my new YouTube channel and hit notifications so you stay up-to-date with all my new content.
Unfortunately the sound cuts out towards the end (at 3’38”), but watch until the end and you’ll see us walk off together arm-in-arm.
This is an example of what an imperfect but successful daygame set looks like. And therein lies an important message—you don’t have to be perfect to get results. You just have to take action and be ‘good enough’.
Daygame Infield Analysis
OK, now let’s go through the video by time slot.
0.01 I do a classic daygame ‘front stop’ here—quite well executed, I think. I get pretty much right in front of the girl (who we’ll call ‘Lena’). There is often a temptation for guys to kind of half-ass a front stop. I do it sometimes myself. You run ahead of the girl but slightly bottle out of standing directly in front of her. Instead you stand sort-of beside her, which has a lot less impact.
I’m not a ‘front stop’ addict by the way—it’s only one way of beginning a daytime interaction. In this instance it was necessary as Lena was walking down the street in the opposite direction to me.
0.05 I say ‘Excuse me’—it comes out slightly weak, although that might just be the sound on the recording. Anyway, she says yes and stops.
0.10 I say ‘I think you look very nice, but very dreamy’. ‘Nice’ is a compliment, of course, while dreamy is . . . something else. Not a ‘neg’ at all, however since I use the word ‘but’ before it it comes across as somewhat accusatory. ‘Dreamy’ is a stock Tom Torero adjective to be applied in these circumstances (the other being ‘focussed’) but what is more important than the chat is the eye contact. Note the way that I look at Lena as though I’m accusing her of something—sizing her up.
0.25 I say she looks like a dreamy ‘cloud‘. Cloud is a bit weak but it doesn’t really matter. It comes over like an accusation which is backed up by the way I look at her. I’m challenging her (albeit in a playful way) and that’s important. No point in just walking up and saying she’s cute.
You must always pull back as well as push forward with compliments.
0.30 I say ‘I am an English gentleman. Can’t you tell?‘ I often use the ‘English gentlemen’ schtick, especially on girls who are not British. Why? I am positioning myself as the pure, upstanding one, while she is suspect. However my posture and eye contact gives the lie to this—physically I am communicating my desire and enhancing male-female polarity even as I’m playing this verbal game where I pretend the opposite is the case.
0.31 She says she doesn’t believe I’m a gentleman while flicking back her hair—my ‘bad boy’ posture is having its effect, as we can tell from this clear indication of interest.
0.39 I try guessing where she’s from a couple of times and get it wrong (although nearly right). So I give up and demand ‘where are you from?’ People say you shouldn’t ask questions, and certainly not early on, but if you do it in a challenging, somewhat cocky way then you can get away with it AND it progresses the conversation.
0.40 I like the way I’m looking at her here—cocky, amused mastery.
0.45 I start asking her about the May Day festivities in Finland, which I’ve been told is a big, crazy party. Internally I have clocked that she’s interested in me—that she’s hooked—and so now I am transitioning into more general chit chat. Toning it down slightly. It’s always good to find some genuine common ground, just so that you can vibe on it. The chat here shows her that I have friends (am a sociable person) and am not just a one-dimensional pick-up dude.
1.07 Observe the way I’m looking at her at around this juncture—it’s cocky and somewhat, well, sexual. I am telegraphing my interest in her through my eyes and the way that I’m standing in relation to her. So while the chat is about sailor outfits, the sub-communication points to something very different.
1.11 ‘Have you graduated from high school?’ ‘Yeah’ ‘Thank god for that!’ It’s not a bad joke and it underlines the sub-communication that my interest in her is more than merely friendly. However, I laugh too much at my own witticism and jerk around a little—my body language isn’t so great here. Was I nervous? Perhaps a little. The added pressure of having the camera on me was quite taxing on that day. I’ll become more accustomed to it.
Note the way she answers ‘last year’ in terms of when she left high school. Actually Lena is in her mid-twenties, but the fact that she is conspiring in my joke is another indicator of her interest.
1.16 I recover my body language and eye contact here.
1.19 Watch my eye contact when I say the word ‘tourist’. I’m looking directly at her, challenging and with desire. This is the type of eye-contact I always aspire to when I meet girls I like. The sub-communication really is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here.
1.30 Chit chat about Brighton and family. The point is to ease off the pressure again and to show that behind the ‘dashing stranger’ image I’m actually just a regular guy. I’m employing push-pull throughout this set, being challenging and sexual on moment and then dropping that for ‘nice guy’ chat the next. Showing the yin and the yang. If you’re all ‘cocky player guy’ then the interaction may look flashy but she will almost certainly not want to follow it up with a date.
1.42 I shift around on my feet a little too much here—it betrays a slight nervousness / camera shyness.
1.54 I ask her if she comes into the city often and she says no. She’s lighting a cigarette, indicating that she’s happy to stick around talking to me for a minute—a good sign. I like the way I don’t immediately follow up. There’s a short silence, a vacuum. But she’s now invested enough for it not to matter.
2.02 ‘Are you a good girl?’ Nice cocky smile here while I’m looking straight into her eyes. Subtext is all, and once again I’m positioning her as transgressive, a ‘bad girl’.
2.07 Short attempt at Russell Brand-style ‘verbal bamboozling’ here, going off on one about consumerism etc. I tell her I notice she’s different and indicate with my hand how her energy has drawn me in. She smiles, giggles a little and nods—she is aware that I am seducing her and she’s enjoying it.
2.21 ‘You are working in Brighton?’ It’s a statement-question. At this point I am sounding out logistics—am I going to have to go to Brighton to meet her for a date?
2.29 Nice cocky-challenging look from me now. My stance is better, more confident.
2.35 Two and a half minutes into the interaction and I introduce myself. It just shows how long you can talk to a perfect stranger without the normal social pleasantries.
2.4o Me: ‘I like this top, it’s very . . . ‘ Her: ‘Revealing…!’ A clearly sexual and flirtatious response from her, and huge in terms of this interaction. It confirms that we are flirting rather than just having a nice chat, and it’s an indictor of interest as well, since no girl would present herself in a sexual light to a man she was not to some degree attracted to.
2.56 I go into the classic routine ‘My mum warned me about girls from X. They’re very pretty, very stylish, and just a little bit . . . dangerous’. It’s one I really like—once again it positions her as the ‘bad girl’, the predator, while I am the innocent mummy’s boy (except my sub communication indicates that that’s clearly not the case’.)
3.03 I say English men are ‘charming, handsome and sophisticated’ while pointing at myself. If you have low self-esteem, as I did for many years, then having the brass balls to say this kind of thing (even tongue in cheek) is a stretch. But if you force yourself to do it it gets easier, and it actually makes you more attractive, since cockiness and (unfounded?) confidence are themselves sexy qualities for a man to possess.
3.07 She says ‘do you even need me for this conversation?’, a nice rejoinder which I laugh at a bit too eagerly. My body language goes off again here.
3.19 She says she’s a spy—callback humour to what I’d said before (and forgotten, which can sometimes happen in the heat of the moment). Again, it gives me the opportunity to look at her in that cocky-flirty way and accuse her of being somehow naughty.
3.32 I say her eyes indicate that she’s naughty—again, flirting by positioning her as the bad girl.
3.38 ‘Are you staying in London tonight or going back down?’ I’m thinking logistics again—is it worth trying to take her for an instant date, or does she have plans this evening (since I prefer not to do instant dates unless there’s an opportunity to take things all the way on the same day.)
At this point the sound cuts out. I can’t remember what I’m saying to her in this last section, but watching the tape my body language looks pretty strong—in fact, if you look at the two of us I’d say it would be quite hard for anyone to guess that we weren’t already acquainted, since we’re getting on very well
At the end of the segment I decide, after all, to try for an instant date (partly for the sake of the recording) and so I put out my arm for her to take—important as it means more body contact and shows she’s comfortable with me leading her.
She is holding her handbag on the arm I try to take and so she turns so I can take her other other arm instead. By now she is invested and comfortable enough for this to happen.
In all, the whole interaction lasted around 5-6 minutes.
After the End?
So what happened after the end of the segment? Well, I was going to take her for a quick Starbucks, but she suddenly decided that it was ‘too crazy’ for a first meeting, and anyway she had to find her friends. So I took her phone number instead. We pinged back and forth and then met up in Brighton where we made out and she came back to the place where I was staying. Another meeting is planned for this week.
You can see our initial messages below.
In all, this is a good example of how, as long as you get most things right, you can afford to drop the ball a little during an initial meeting with someone you’re attracted to.
It also shows just what is possible, and how you can meet new people without resorting to Tinder, Bumble, or going to loud and expensive nightclubs.
Daygame Infield Analysis Takeaways
- You don’t have to be perfect, you do have to take action
- Sub-communication, delivered through eye contact and body language is key
- Be nice, but also be challenging
- Find ways to subtly sexualise the interaction—that is, you can be having a friendly chat with her, but underneath it she must be aware that you approached her because you fancy her.
- Use push-pull . . . that is, don’t flirt ALL the time. Make sure you pull it back a bit too. Be ‘normal’ so as to create comfort. If she thinks you’re a one-trick pony player type you might get a great reaction at the time, but she likely won’t want to take things any further.
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