Calibration and Game

One of the most commonly misunderstood areas of game is calibration. In particular, how do you adjust your game based on how the girl sees you at a given moment in time.

Understanding this is key to knowing which game tactics to use as part of your leadership of the seduction dance.

If you haven’t read Mystery Method yet by all means start there. Understanding the basic Attraction -> Comfort -> Seduction model is fundamental to game.

Most guys get the model. But with experience you also learn that in real life the process isn’t linear like the model. You don’t necessary go directly through each of the boxes Mystery lays out in the model one by one. Instead you fractionate between the various steps depending on where you are with the girl.

As Nash rightly points out you need to look at the guy/girl/context. The game you play will always depend on that context.

Mystery developed his method from doing night game in LA in the early 2000’s. That is just one context. A context where the girls have a high opinion of themselves from getting constantly approached. And being in LA the girls are also on the lookout for celebrities and other very high status men at the clubs, so they’re quick to filter and dismiss guys who don’t meet this standard.

Consequently classic mystery method assumes she considers her value higher than yours and so you in response you do things like:

• Work the venue first to establish your value via social proof and pre-selection (she needs to see you’re a fun guy who women like being around and who men instinctively follow).
• Open indirect (don’t show too much interest).
• If needed neg her (remember – a neg is not an insult but rather a neutral comment that can be interpreted positively or negatively, and so the ambiguity makes her wonder about herself).

Do this successfully, and assuming you’re a reasonably attractive guy physically relative to the girl, you’ll have successfully build up her perceived value of you while perhaps knocking down her off her pedestal a bit.

Once you’ve done the work in the attraction phase then you proceed to ground the interaction by bouncing to another spot and building comfort, with the intent to extract later for seduction.

That method works. And they will work in most contexts because in the majority of cases women will perceive their value as higher than the value of most men.

G’z up Ho’s Down

But what if you’re a man who has game, and/or has built your value over time, and/or have a lot of social proof in the situation, and/or maybe you’re traveling to a country where for whatever reason you’re perceived as “shiny” compared to the majority of local men?

What if she sees you has higher value than her from the start?

In this case where a girl perceives your value is higher than hers and you come in with a neg she may take it poorly and feel that you’re insulting her. Spend too much building yourself up with DHV stories and she may see you as way out of her league.

This can often lead to her not wanting to get pump and dumped, or even being more bitchy to you because she thinks you’re only pretending to like her for an easy lay.

In these cases you take a softer approach with more comfort, as the attraction is already well established:

• You show genuine interest in her and build connection.
• You throw in the occasional tease or push to keep things flirty but these are more gentle.
• Your main work is narrowing her perceived gap in your value so that you are still higher than her, but not so high she will get crushed. This means you show more of your K selected side.

Obviously the second case is much less common but it does happen.

I choose two extreme examples to illustrate the point. In reality this is an ongoing calibration you need to do in your interactions with women.

The point is there is an overall sweet spot. Women date up. You have to ensure she perceives your value as higher than hers, while at the same time if she perceives too big a gap she’ll likely withdraw to protect herself.

Be calibrated to where her perception is and you’ll know what elements of your game to bring to the situation.

If you have good game and a high intrinsic value (a goal for all of us) then you will find that after establishing the initial attraction you will spend more time in comfort (well named).

This goes true for ongoing relationships as well. Do behaviors that lower your value in her eyes and over time and she will lose attraction and stop seeing you. But if she sees your value getting higher than she’s comfortable with, you may find her creating drama, giving you comfort tests, or other type of attention seeking behavior to reassure yourself.

In the interest of completely nerding out, I’ve drafted a matrix to further illustrate. Enjoy:

	Gaming Her Value	Gaming Your Value
She sees herself as higher value	– Neg – Tease – Disqualify her	– Social proof – pre-selection – DHV stories about how awesome you are – Qualify her
She sees you as higher value	– Compliment her (this is where a lot of guys find that “beta” game works when traveling to non-western countries) – Future projection	– “Romantic” behaviors (this is the quadrant where a lot of girl advice on dating to men comes from, as women want to be dating men higher value than them) – Provide comfort – DHV with stories about how you support family

Again, you want to keep yourself in the “sweet spot” of her perceiving you as higher value than herself, but not not unattainably so.