The Game

had projected on the wall. The seminar was packed. There were more than a hundred and fifty people in the room. Many of them I recognized from other seminars, including Extramask.
    It was getting to be an all-too-familiar sight: a person onstage with a headset instructing a group of needy men on how to save themselves from nightly onanism. But there was a difference. DeAngelo was a good-looking guy, like Ross Jeffries had said. He reminded me of Robert DeNiro, if DeNiro had been a mama’s boy who’d never been in a fight in his life.
    DeAngelo stood out from the other gurus precisely because he didn’t stand out. He wasn’t charismatic or interesting. He didn’t have the crazy gleam of a wanna-be cult leader or some gaping hole in his soul that he was trying to fill with women. He didn’t even claim to be good at the game. He was very ordinary. But he was dangerous because he was organized.
    He had clearly spent months working on his seminar. It was not only entirely scripted but cleaned up for mass consumption. It was a school of pickup instruction that could be presented to the mainstream without shocking anyone with its crudeness, its attitude toward women, or the deviousness of its techniques—except, that is, for his recommendation of reading the book Dog Training by Lew Burke for tips on handling girls.
    DeAngelo was a bright guy—and a threat to Ross. Many of the speakers at his seminar were, like himself, Ross’s former students: among them Rick H., Vision, and Orion, an uber-nerd who was famous as the first PUA to sell videotapes of himself approaching girls on the street. This video series, Magical Connections, was considered hard evidence that nerds with hypnosis skills could get laid.
    “Seduction,” DeAngelo read from his notes, “is defined in the dictionary as an ‘enticement to wrongdoing, specifically the offense of inducing a woman to consent to unlawful sexual intercourse by enticements which overcome her scruples.’”
    “In other words,” he continued, “seduction implies tricking, being dishonest, and hiding your motives. That is not what I am teaching. I’m teaching something called attraction. Attraction is working on yourself and improving yourself to the point where women are magnetically attracted to you and want to be around you.”
    Not once did DeAngelo mention the names of his competitors and rivals. He was too smart for that. He was going to try to take this whole underground world up for air, and he was going to do it by not acknowledging the underground world at all. He had stopped posting online and, instead, let his employees stick up for him when he was flamed. He wasn’t a genius or an innovator like Mystery and Ross. But he was a great marketer.
    “How do you make someone want something?” he asked, after making his students practice giving each other James Dean underlooks. “You give it value. You show that others like it. You make it scarce. And you make them work for it. I want you to think about other ways during lunch.”
    I joined DeAngelo and some of his other students for a burger and found out a little more about him. A struggling real estate agent from Eugene, Oregon, he moved to San Diego for a fresh start. Lonely, he yearned to cross that invisible barrier separating two strangers at a club. So he began searching the Web for tips and cultivating friends who were good with women. One of those friends was Riker, a Ross Jeffries protégé who turned him onto using America Online to meet women. Sending instant messages was a way for DeAngelo to practice flirting the way his new player friends did, but without risking public embarrassment.
    “That was the chi, ” he said as students milled about awkwardly, trying to overhear. “I was learning new ideas, implementing them, and then noticing how women responded on AOL. That’s when I learned that busting women’s balls and really slamming them immediately didn’t have the effect that the intuitive mind would guess it would. So I became cocky and funny. I stole their lines, teased them, accused them of hitting on me, and never gave them a break.”
    Flushed with his new findings, DeAngelo delivered a fifteen-page screed to Cliff’s List, one of the most established online seduction newsletters. The then-nascent seduction community ate it up: A new guru had arrived. Cliff, the middle-aged Canadian businessman who ran the list by day and hunted for new master PUAs to bring into the community by