"Mystery and his crew were going around the club performing magic tricks on girls, followed by a crew of TV cameramen. I don't even think they were real cameramen. I think the idea was, 'Well, if we pretend like we're being filmed for a documentary, girls are way more likely to talk to some tall freaky magician in platform boots and a leopard skin hat.' "

"We all ended up at a packed East Village bar, really late, and now he was going full force, working his tactics on my journalist friends," says Michel. "There were ESP games, palm readings, and some faux mysticism where he claimed he could stare into your eyes and glean deep knowledge of your soul. He was wearing a ridiculous outfit—I think leather pants and black nail polish were involved—which might have been fine on the Sunset Strip but was incredibly cheesy for New York. Virtually every girl there seemed to be shunning him. Finally he had a meltdown and shouted, in the middle of the bar, 'ONE OF YOU IS GONNA FUCK ME TONIGHT!' "

for the book's methods to reach a saturation point, and completely fine, except there's one problem: Women still love the jerks. In a situation where most men's seduction instinct, learned from The Game or not, is to play the jerk, then on paper it would follow that men should compete with one another to prove to a target who is the bigger asshole: proving their worth to her by flinging insults at each other, rising to the top by cutting down the bottom, what have you.

In practice, this caveman-style Game hasn't worked very well. At Black and White on 10th Street, Carl B. approached a set of girls already occupied by two fairly muscular men. One of them was wearing a hat that said "Dubai," the name of a major United Arab Emirates city. "Hey, you've been to Dubai too?" Carl pressed. The guy hadn't.

"Oh. Well, must be pretty awesome to have a hat from Dubai without actually having to go there." Carl thought he was in; instead the girls said he was "needlessly mean." "You should just leave," they told him.

Other PUAs nervous about the new rules of the Game think that if they go full blast with Strauss's techniques, using as many as possible all at once, they can overcome the obsolescence of the moves when used in isolation. Call it hyper-Game.

Inside Webster Hall at the Plug Independent Music Awards in early February, Jon brought an enormous camera rig, and in an aggressive form of peacocking, took photos of people as they entered from the V.I.P. door. Inevitably this would prompt a response from women, making him seem both temporarily important—he had a camera—and less obvious about his intentions—you know, he was there to take photos, nothing else.

This guy was admittedly brilliant, but when he tried to close the deal, his approach was so under the radar that something seemed suspicious. He said, "You should give me your number so I can send you these photos."

This would have been victory, but after playing so many games at once, Jon had psyched himself out. "No, that's a bad idea," he said, adding inexplicably, "I'm having trouble with spyware."

I call Strauss. He's at his new home in L.A., awaiting the delivery of Panic Park, an arcade video game that, like Mario Party or WarioWare, is a hodgepodge of smaller, genre-spanning games. One second you're racing, another you're catching floating dollar bills.

What most bothers people about the routines, I tell him, is the manipulation involved. Strauss spins it differently. Better to have a nice guy who pretends to be a jerk for a couple days in order to get you to like him, and then is a nice guy in the relationship, than the opposite."

If anything, Strauss believes, The Game is doing women a service because it's widening the dating pool. More and more kinds of men are talking to them, which means they have more and better choices.

"They're making the rules—we're just trying to find a way to play by them," Strauss says. "I talked to some of the women who I'd been with afterward, and did interviews, broke down the experience from their point of view. A lot of them knew I was running Game. They knew the lines and patterns and routines. Even the first girl I had the threesome with, she said, 'Oh, I knew exactly what you were doing. I had never been with a woman before, I didn't want to, but I thought it was such a cool thing that you were doing, so I went along with it because it felt comfortable.' "

Strauss has read Dolly's Cocks and Dolls blog post, and points out that even though she recognized she was dealing with a PUA, she still made out with him.

"No, it's 'What's your sign?' We all know it. But the fact is, it still works. Because (a) at some point when you're talking to a woman—and maybe this is my Los Angeles experience but I find it generally to be true—you're gonna end up talking about astrology, and she's gonna ask you what your sign is. Do you find that generally to be true?"

"Second thing is, 'What's your sign?' is a neutral entertaining opener, and it's a DHV—demonstration of higher value—it's the same fucking structure as the openers the pickup artists use today. Before it was a cliché, it was a nonsexual way to start a conversation. It demonstrated that you knew something interesting and spiritual. The openers today, like 'Do you think spells work?' are pretty much the same thing. So nothing's really changed."

People need to meet, and it's all about thinking those interactions through—specifically, how you might handle being caught using one of Strauss's canned lines.

"If you are getting busted, all you need to do is have a contingency plan," Strauss explains. "You say, 'Yeah, I just read that book! I wanted to go out and try it today. It's funny, I get busted the first time using it.' All you have to do is be smart about it. You can't be knocked off course.

"It's almost like tax law. You got the government—and I'm not saying the analogy between the government and taxpayers is like men and women—the idea is they keep changing the law and trying to make it airtight, and there's always someone out trying to figure out the loophole, and they're finding it every year."

that's seen The Game manifest itself in all too many ways, from plastic firemen's hats to amateur hypnosis, I met Steve Lucien, DC, and Vic, three TV writers who had flown in from L.A. for the weekend. Under the pretense of visiting friends on the East Coast, the three really had come into the city because, as Strauss writes at the end of The Game, L.A. is completely sarged out. They want to investigate New York.

"Hey, there's some weird shit happening in this bar," Lucien will say. "These guys are just coming up and saying really weird shit to women—something about an eagle? Then they're mean to you. It's sick!"

After seeing dozens of men at every Hollywood bar carrying around a pocketful of beads to drape around women's necks, per the book's tip, Vic had taken to carrying around plastic snakes, which he would inexplicably leave on bar counters, and a $100 coupon for a $300 psychic reading. The coupons are a conversation prompt, often parlayed into kino from women interested in astrology. Brags Vic, "I can usually get the girl to give me a psychic reading in a few minutes."

"Anyway, my friend has had this mustache for as long as I've known him but he just shaved it and now he's freaking out because he has a really bad tan line on his upper lip. He has a date in two days so we were discussing what he can do. My question for you is: Should he wear a fake mustache on the date?"

Overt is becoming the new covert, believes DC, after a night of post-sarging that netted two numbers and, by his account, a "sorta shitty kiss."

"Now I think it's about putting it all out there, like, 'Let's get married tonight.' Other times, though, I have to be more guarded. That's when I tell her I think she wouldn't be a very good wife."

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