“You have to read The Game,” said Rex*, a freckled, charismatic, age-anonymous, Mac-nerd male actor. Rex, originally from Texas, is one of my co-stars in the play I am working on. During a game of poker on a cold, late night, Rex first spoke of The Game.

An interesting thing was happening during this game (also my poker de-flowerment). As I looked at my cards in total earnestness, I noticed that Rex was much more apt to fold if he didn’t feel he had anything to play, whereas I wanted to stay in it and folding was out of the question. I sensed his insecurity immediately. He needed a routine, to know his game before committing, otherwise he didn’t want to play.

Rex is in a monogamous relationship with another woman and is not a pickup artist, but he insists everyone should read The Game, that it appeals not only to picking up women, but to human nature on the whole. How do you make someone else want something? You give it value and make them work for it. Maybe I had something to learn if I was willing to stay in that game just for the sake of staying in it, even if I had shitty cards.

So I picked up the book, written by a journalist who, before becoming a Pickup Artist (PUA), was just another Average Frustrated Chump (AFC), a “stereotypical nice guy who tends to engage in wimpy patterns of behavior around women he has yet to bed.”

“If you can make a woman envy you, you can make her sleep with you,” he writes. The author’s purpose in joining the “seduction communities” was twofold: on the one hand, he was a male writer with a history of sexual frustration and alienation from women, using himself as an experiment for his job and, on the other, he wanted to cure himself and become a seductive man in demand.

The point of being a PUA is not to necessarily attract a long term mate (though that is not discouraged), but to “sarge,” or pick up as many women as possible, with the potential goal of developing a harem of cock-respecting ladies (remember Tom Cruise in Magnolia?).

Magic, mystery, personality tests, eye makeup, are some of the tactics the PUAs use to attract and bed women. Men even pay money to attend seminars on The Game. “Mystery” is the name of the lead PUA from whom the author learned his techniques. Let me share a little more of the lingo and terminology from The Game. The following are tactics used when first approaching a woman:

Freeze out: to ignore a woman to make her seek validation.

Neg: an ambiguous statement or seemingly accidental insult delivered to a beautiful woman a PUA has just met with the intent of demonstrating a lack of interest in her.

Takeaway: a pickup technique in which a man leaves for a little in order to demonstrate a lack of neediness and increase her attraction to him.

Let me say that it troubles me that these terms need to exist. The Game is a somewhat-juvenile book that documents men who seem to think they’ve earned some kind of glory just because they’ve gotten a response, but then realize it isn’t all about the response. And then, there are the targets themselves. The kinds of women the Seduction Communities “sarge,” share common tags: foreign, alcohol, club girls, models, strippers, and parties. So how is that reality?

With picking up women comes acquired confidence. And yet, never underestimate The Game’s turnaround time. Though male fantasy may have us believe that accumulating dozens of notches in one’s belt gives a feeling of power, most realize, sooner or later, that it won’t cure a guy’s existential despair. Men are not dogs, says the author, but “by believing in our nobler nature, women have the amazing power to inspire us to live up to it. This is one reason why men tend to fear commitment.”

And so, maybe I was onto something in that poker game with Rex. I had no idea what I was doing. I was going with the flow, with nothing to lose, only things to observe. And I noticed that made him nervous. Sticking it out slowly to see what happens was more important than dramatizing it to getting a result, or a “hook-point,” as the PUAs would say.

But of course, we weren’t playing for money either; it was my first time.

*Name changed to protect the innocent.