3 Pickup Artist Techniques in The Game

This article is an excerpt from the Shortform summary of "The Game" by Neil Strauss. Shortform has the world's best summaries of books you should be reading.

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What are the pickup artist techniques featured in The Game? Which of these pickup artist techniques does Style use?

In The Game, Neil Strauss outlines several pickup artist techniques. These pickup artist techniques are commonly used in the PUA community. Strauss learns all the methods, and uses bits and pieces from each one.

Neil Meets Mystery and Learns Pickup Artist Techniques

The irony was that the purpose of the The Game book techniques were to make men appear interesting, but their obsession with the game prevented them from being interesting, which was the most effective way of attracting women. Keep this in mind when you’re reading about Neil Strauss’s techniques and other PUA techniques in general.

The seduction community’s leaders were a handful of PUAs who were considered gurus. Each guru taught disciples his distinct set of rules and techniques—including psychology, magic tricks, and hypnosis—to seduce women.

Neil wanted to meet all the gurus, and he planned to integrate pickup artist techniques from each. The first guru he met was a Canadian magician named Mystery, who had just started offering workshops for PUAs-in-training.

The workshop consisted of three nights of lessons and in-the-field practice in bars and clubs. As students practiced the The Game book techniques, Mystery and his wing (aka wingman) critiqued and coached them.

Neil somewhat stumbled through pickups during the workshop, but Mystery saw huge potential in Neil as a PUA.

1. The Mystery Method

When Mystery was 21 and still a virgin, he began studying how women reacted when he hit on them. Over 10 years, Mystery pieced together the principles of social interaction and the patterns of male-female dynamics, which he called the Mystery Method. Neil Strauss’s techniques would later include many of these methods.

The Mystery Method was designed to be a subtle, indirect approach. If Mystery’s technique was executed correctly, a woman wouldn’t know that she was being hit on, but she would want to be.

The keys to the Mystery Method were:

Make yourself seem like the most fun and interesting person in the room.
Confuse your target (the woman you’re trying to hit on) with negs, which are backhanded compliments or vague insults.
Use gimmicks, such as magic tricks and ESP tests, to impress and intrigue her.
Maintain a push-pull balance, in order to keep her engaged and wanting more. For example, if your conversation with a woman is going well and you show that you’re interested in her, then look around the club for a moment, as if you’re distracted or looking for someone else.
Never be the aggressor. For example, lead the woman into offering her phone number—but never explicitly ask for it.

2. Ross Jeffries and NLP

Jeffries’s Speed Seduction method was based on a technique called neuro-linguistic programming (NLP), which blended psychology and hypnosis. NLP was based on the concept that words, movements, and suggestions could tap into a person’s subconscious to affect her thoughts, emotions, and actions.

Using NLP, a PUA would steer his conversations with a woman toward the subjects of attraction and arousal. Then, he would use questions and suggestions to connect those feelings of attraction with a physical sensation, in order to make the woman subconsciously associate the PUA with those feelings and sensations.