---
title: Episode 167 Flash Game vs Smooth Game
episode_number: 167
era: late
source_file: Episode 167 Flash Game vs Smooth Game.mp3
audio_size_mb: 55.6
duration_sec: 1822.6
duration_min: 30.4
language: en
provider: deepgram
model: nova-3
diarized: true
confidence: 0.997
transcribed_at: 2026-05-27T17:06:32Z---

# Episode 167 Flash Game vs Smooth Game

**Speaker 0:** Podcast a 167. This is your uncle Thomas Torero with the daygame podcast. Every week, this episode is on flash game versus smooth game. What are the differences, and how do you go from one to the other, and why should you? Today's episode is being recorded and will be broadcast from inside the passion wagon. Here I am. It's like pirate radio. I'm inside a van driving from Wales North towards Manchester for the start of the Black Sheep Bandit, Below the Belt book tour. I am arriving tomorrow in Dublin, which is the twenty second, and the following day, twenty third in Manchester, twenty fourth Edinburgh, twenty fifth Birmingham, twenty sixth, back down to Cardiff, and twenty seventh in London. Every evening, it's 7PM. We're meeting up in O'Neill's pub, except for in Edinburgh when we meet in Malone's. So don't go to O'Neill's in Glasgow. Come along to Edinburgh. Further details, if you didn't listen to anything I just said or you wanna know which O'Neill's, because I'm aware in London there are a few, then below on the blog post, I will list everything. So there you go. It's a free tour. You come along. You can meet me. You can have a a pint with me. More importantly, you can meet other daygamers in your city. Hopefully, are some active ones that can kick your beautiful backside into action. So rather than just listening to these podcasts or dabbling, you can start in Britain. That's right. You can talk to women in the British Isles and in Ireland, Fair Island. So that's the plan. And you can ask me questions. We'll go through sticking points. And inside the van underneath me right now, I've got thirty, thirty five ish, I haven't counted copies of the new book below the belt. So I'll flog them 5 ish per city, and I'll sign them. And this tour is is really not to sell the books. I've already sold a lot from the launch, so thank you if you've bought them. This tour is to meet British daygamers and to obviously do a bit of daygame and to see the state of daygame in these fair aisles. Because when I recently did a blog post asking guys that are active daygamers, I said, how many daygamers are actually in your city? And I I was asking guys in London, in New York, in Los Angeles, in Berlin, in Amsterdam, or whatever. And the feedback, both public on the blog and private via email or guys I know what's happening is that the numbers have basically remained very small. And in a way, this is good. In a way, this is bad. It's good in that people imagine there are hundreds of daygamers out there because thousands of people watch the YouTube videos. So people think, well, the city's ruined. There's so many daygamers because there's so many guys talking about this on forums or chat groups on WhatsApp. When in reality, you're getting roughly five to 10 guys in a massive city like New York or London, Los Angeles, probably less. And some guy was saying, oh, there's 25 in my city. I think it was, San Francisco. Well, there might be 25 guys on a daygame group or 25 guys in a seminar or 25 guys texting each other. But the guys that go out three to five times a week, they know what they're doing. They're not spamming. They get laid most importantly, and they can break down how they're daygamers. And so the numbers have remained that way even in London when people said, oh, London's destroyed. There's so many daygamers. I used to walk around London nightly, and you'd see the same five, ten guys max who were really putting in the work. Of course, some guys get into it and then do a few weeks, a month or two, and then they drop out. I've made a video on daygame dropout rates and the reasons for that. So it's a good thing because you have all these cities to yourself, basically. And in today's podcast, it's about how to have them even more to yourself. Why is the low numbers a bad thing? Well, you could say that means most guys guys are stuck. They are either in their head, they know about this stuff, but they can't execute, or they don't know anything about daygame and they still get drunk every Friday and Saturday night and hope for the best. They go out on the pool. They are blind drunk, and they see what happens. Or I suppose most guys are on Tinder. What's the saying? Punching below your weight, getting girls that are they're settling. Let's say they're settling for girls, and they don't even know what's out there. They don't even know what's possible. So that's why it's sad, but all the more for me, all the more for you. And I suspect in the cities that I'm visiting on this tour, many guys might come to the meetup, but when you look them in the eye and say, do daygame? Are you a regular daygamer? You'll just find one or two, and you'll be able to tell who they are. Anyway, moaning over. I'll see you on this tour if you're in Britain or Ireland. And let's talk about today's topic, which is flash game versus smooth game. Flash game looks really good. Flash game is using the complete daygame toolkit in Street Hustle, using all the tricks and tips and techniques and like a stage illusionist, you know, like David Copperfield with the sequin waistcoats and the smoke machine and the the girl and the, you know, he's sawing her in half and the doves and all that glitzy Vegas magician like attire, you can see that daygamer a mile off. He's flashy because maybe he's filming a YouTube video. And to get many clicks, to get a nice click baity video, it needs to look like the girls laughing all the time and it's a really high energy set and maybe the guy spins around and he picks her up and it's worth watching. It's entertaining. It's like one of those prank videos and it's encouraging. It gets an audience so that's why guys make it. Maybe it's because the guys just got into pickup and he's so excited which is a good thing. He's got that puppy dog energy and I miss that when you get into game, you are like a kid in a sweet shop. You just run around. You're not really aware of the difficulties to come. Just talking to girls is amazing. Just getting a phone number, you think this is it. I've mastered the universe. I will have no more problems. You don't really know about the other levels of rejection. But anyway, that naive, blue sky is wonderful. So the guy is full of energy and he's using the same energy that you might see in a nightclub. He's using the same game techniques, the extreme push pull, the extreme spikes, the massive negs, and she's giggling. And he thinks I'm gonna make it really sexual, you know, verbally or physically on the street. He's going for it and good on him because he's certainly not behind Tinder. He's certainly not mister nice guy timid anymore. He's gone to the opposite extreme. And once again, you can spot jumps dramatically in front of girls. And I remember one guy in London, this was years ago, and he would run up to a girl and pick her up as the opener, a classic dance floor open in a nightclub, but he was doing it during the day, you know, going for loads and loads of make outs, enjoying himself. I've seen guys doing salsa on the street. I've seen guys that are heavily peacocked during the day, you know, the proper dandy, which is fine. Again, better than being the gray dad like anonymous guy that looks like everybody else, the clone. So, yeah, you get into pickup, you read a book on game, and you're not really sure in the beginning of the difference between day game and night game. It's very common for guys to come up to me and say, why don't you do night game? In fact, a guy came up to me the other day. He was doing a program with another very good instructor, but this is a night game instructor. And he said, Tom, I just don't get why you don't do night game and daygame. And the answer I gave him is the answer I always give. It's like comparing tennis to table tennis. Yeah. Tennis, big energy, big strength, big power being night game. And table tennis is a different a different game. You could superficially say, oh, it's the it's the same kind of dynamic as tennis, but it's a different game, different training, different athletes. It's a different thing. So I say specialize depending on your personality and your energy levels and just simply what you prefer, perhaps depending on your age as well. Can you go out for those multiple nights in a row and perhaps drink for multiple nights in a row? Do you enjoy pumping music? Do you love big group sets? Are you boisterous? You know, do you love the physicality? Well, that's fantastic. And I admire night gamers. But day gamers, if you think of night game as the as the flashy David Copperfield stage magic, then daygame is that close-up magic, that sleight of hand, the card magic, the coin magic, the saloon magician. And I'll come on to talk about magic, because it's a very good analogy. But do you see the difference between flash game, the flashy night stuff versus smooth and you could say stealth daygame. That's why I call my video product stealth seduction because it's very m I five like. It blends in. And you could say the best pickup artist in the world or the best daygamer in the world is the one that no one has noticed. Yeah. So when I said, you know, there's only five or 10 guys usually per big city doing daygame. Well, they might be the guys you notice. They might be the jumping in front, you know, doing the same thing. They might be slightly peacocked. They might be in the same place as all the others, you know. They only do it in Oxford Street or on 5th Avenue. They're the ones you see. But what about the ones that are more sneaky? When I started daygame, I was doing indirect, remember? And I was start I started doing seated sets outside the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square. I would go into art galleries. One of my first lays from daygame came from an English girl who was looking at a painting inside the National Gallery. And I went up to her in my opener was something about her wellies. I think it was indirect and that I said I wanted to buy them for my sister and where had she got them, and then I think I teased her and, yeah, an English girl inside a gallery. So obviously, lots of other people around. Obviously, I didn't jump. I blended in. Nobody saw what I was doing. There were security guys in the art gallery. I used to do it in other museums. I used to do it in book shops where you have to whisper. I love bookshop game. I was going direct at that stage at that stage, but it was still very smooth and under the radar. It's like when you do a waitress. Yeah? There's many of me doing these on YouTube where her colleagues are around. And yet you can be bold and show off and do it in front of everybody and have customers like, oh. But the ones that really work and the ones that I enjoy and I've done two this year, two memorable ones, one in Riga and one in Vilnius, back to back cities on the van tour. Both of them were waitresses, and I did the stealth seduction. So I closed secretly by getting her to write her Facebook on the receipt, or me writing my Facebook on the receipt and hoping for the best and making sure her colleagues knew nothing. It was smooth because it was under the radar. It was calibrated. It was largely nonverbal, so it was discreet. I talk about this again and again in the secret society sections of the new book. And it relies, yeah, on eyes. It just relies on vibe. It relies on a sexual energy. It is much much cleverer than the front stop. Now I'm not dissing the front stop. I love the front stop. The front stop works. It's got me laid many times where you jump in front of a really fast girl and girls have said, wow, I just admired the balls of you jumping in front of me, you know, especially if she's hot and intimidating. But that front stop is for one situation, for fast moving girls on these busy streets. So I would say stretch your day game. I always do this with students or I used to when I taught live. Start with the front stop, you know, grow grow a pair of balls, get some hairs on your chest, not hairy balls. And, yeah, learn to be direct. It's all good. Have a bit of flashiness about you. Use some of these flashy techniques and then take it down and work on your smoothness. So I would take the student into a busy shop, and you could take them into a bookstore, into a quiet cafe. Push it. Yeah. And it's it's obviously about facing the spotlight effect, but that's a good thing to overcome and switching from verbal to nonverbal. So obviously, beginner says, what did you say? What did you say? And the advanced guy will understand that nothing actually has to be said. If you've got great eye contact and a solid smirk, you're closing a bit of distance, you got a twinkle in your eye, you say one or two things to break rapport, she gets it. And that vibe is very, very hard to explain, of course, to teach and even to film. Because the smooth stealth seduction stuff, even when I filmed all those however many lays, 17 lays on stealth seduction, the camera's point of view, so it's looking at the girl. And some guys have said to me, oh, it didn't sound like a lot was going on in that set. Yeah. It's not as flashy obviously as the high energy, laughing sets you might see on YouTube. What you couldn't see is obviously my eye contact, my smirk. You can never on a YouTube video on a daygame and field video feel the vibe, the crackling sexual tension. You can never feel that. So it's often good with the student or you can do it with your wing. Let him stand close to the set or bring him in. Even if it's one girl, it doesn't have to be a two set. And just if you're better than him and you're trying to teach him this stuff, let him feel this dynamic. The difference between social chat. I know lots of daygamers still are stuck in social chatting away to the girl and sexual daygame. Yeah. And let him feel the difference between attraction, which is high fiving, the girls laughing, and arousal, where the set might be silent. And you're moving one step closer and she blushes. And you can cut that sexual tension in the air with a knife. No. You don't need to carry a knife when you do day game. That's a metaphor. But you get what I mean. So you are under the radar. You are fluid. You can adapt your day game. It's three-dimensional, and you're not flashy. Remember the quote, disguise your skill, don't exhibit your skill. Disguise your skill, don't exhibit your skill. And of course, when you get into this and you learn that skill, wanna show off. And you show off to your wing, you show off to your mates, you show off to the girl, you show off to the video camera if you're making infield videos. And then you want to, make it super smooth, make it super stealth and, blend in like an m I five spy. And then almost become the gray man. I know I said, you're getting away from blending in in the beginning. But ironically, you kind of wanna go back to, I think that's the term, the gray man, the every man, the man that you wouldn't pick out. So maybe when I go to these cities on this tour, there will be people doing very stealth advanced daygame right under my nose, and I won't spot it. I usually do. I'm very calibrated to usually, I I see how a girl's behaving. I see a guy and a girl talking on the street, and I'm looking at the girl, and I recognize her reactions. But if the guy's smooth, I won't see him approach. I won't see him doing his thing. I might not even see him number close. That's how good he might be. Like Oliver Twist, like a pickpocket. Yeah? I think a long time ago, I told you to watch a documentary on YouTube about one of the world's best pickpockets. Now, he's a stage pickpocket, so he does it as entertainment. I'm sure there's other pickpockets that you've never heard of just like other daygamers you've never heard of because they're so smooth. But if you've got forty five minutes or I think it's an hour, type in Bob Arno, a r n o, pickpocket or world's best pickpocket. That's how he builds himself. He's like a Las Vegas pickpocket guy, but he takes watches obviously and wallets and coins and people's ties. And he breaks down how he does it. And in this documentary, he's going to find real pickpockets in Italy. And he's fascinated by their level of skill and they're suspicious at first, but then they're fascinated by what he can do like removing a belt. And it's an art. And of course, a pickpocket, it's it's a secret art. Yeah? Because you're gonna get arrested, you're gonna get imprisoned or worse. So he's talking about misdirection. He's talking about pressure points. Lots of daygame techniques you will recognize funnily enough, certainly to do with tourist hotspots. But look how stealth it is. Okay? Many people think when you say daygame, they think it's just jumping in front of girls and even more problematic for many guys who I've taught. They just think daygame is the opener. So they'll run around. They've learned the opener off of YouTube and they'll run around and you'll see them say, excuse me, I just wanted to say, you look nice. And then they have that expectation. She hooks or she doesn't hook. And if she doesn't hook, they move on to the next skill. Hello. Excuse me. You look nice. And that's it. So kind of a caricature of daygame if you like. They're completely missing the whole art and craft of daygame, which is like learning how to pickpocket, I guess. Or the better analogy, as I said, magic. A film I watched, this week, a documentary I watched was about, I think, the world's best, card mechanic, you call it. He's not a close-up card magician. He's a card mechanic in that in days gone by, he would be a grifter. He would be a road hustler. He would be a guy in the casino, maybe employed by the casino to do dodgy deals. That's where the saying comes from. He can deal cards from the middle of the deck, the second one from the top, the bottom of the deck. He can influence the game. And the documentary is about a card mechanic called Richard Turner. And I'm sure you can find it. The name escapes me, quite appropriately for the art of escapism. And of course, he's he's fantastic and he shows you his skills, but then you realize that he's blind. He became blind as a child. I think as a teenager, he lost his sight completely. So he's doing the card mechanic tricks through his fingers. He says he sees with his fingers and watch his training, watch his repetition, watch his dexterity, watch his skill, watch how it's such a fucking art. Okay. It moves on from science to an art and a craft, the art and craft of deception. Yep. So where is the stage stuff, the David Copperfield stuff, disappearing over the Grand Canyon, whatever, that all looks amazing, especially on television or to a big stage audience. When you're up to someone like Richard Turner, sitting around a table, sitting around the felt, a meter away from him watching him do these things with cards or if you watch a coin magician, it's it's a supreme skill and it's, it really, really, really reminds me of daygamers. It's low key, it's quiet, it's subtle, it's nuanced, and it appeals to a certain type of person. I've always found that far more fascinating than the the big kind of cheesy 90s, magical shows. So again, you kind of pick one and you specialize in it. And I said to the guy who came up to me, just coming back to that story, the one who said, why don't you do night game? And I said, specialize. And you rarely meet an instructor or a very good pickup artist who does everything. He's usually a really good night gamer or he's a really good lounge bar gamer or he's a day gamer. Yeah. Or he or he specializes in social circle. You have to specialize. You have to find your niche that matches your interests and energy levels, and then go for it. So I specialized in daygame and completely ignored nightgame. So perhaps that's a secret of getting good and appreciating the art and the craft. So appreciating the whole process, taking, fulfillment, finding joy in doing the daygame. I I still get a lot of joy when I do a mini bounce or a little misdirection or I do a an open question or I realize I'm qualifying the girl or I do a sneaky bit of kino or when you pull a girl on an instant day, you always chuckle inside. That's just that's a beautiful little magic trick. Yeah. Or when you do verbal escalation or I still get a kick out of doing my physical escalation steps on a date because you go from the girl being nervous and sitting opposite you to having her next to you and leaning on you and being floppy. It's magic. It's absolutely magic. So enjoy that and you'll realize then why just jumping in front of girls and going, you look nice. And then the next girl, excuse me, you look nice. It's it's not game. Just like, sure, you can get laid from Tinder and guys get laid from Tinder. And they say, why you do all this daygame stuff? You know, they they've completely missed out the art and craft, the joy of of daygame. Not just the fact that you can get higher quality girls. I don't mean morally. That sounds like the guys online, higher quality girls. I mean, hot girls. Yeah. Younger hotter girls from daygame, than from Tinder. It's just much more enjoyable. And, take pride in the smoothness of your game, you know, respect the craft. When you watch that Richard Turner card mechanic documentary, fucking hell, respect the craft. Just like the magicians at the Magic Castle in LA, respect guys like Richard Turner, for the discipline, for the dedication, for his understanding of card mechanics. It's it's a beautiful thing and it's under the radar rather than observable. And in the new book, I talk about this a lot. You know, emotional, so her hindbrain versus logical, the forebrain. When you might stand there, a guy who doesn't really know how women make decisions, so he's standing there at the front door with the girl. People are walking past and he's trying to logically convince her to come inside and have sex. And that's not how it works. It's far more subtle. A pickup artist knows that you're engaging her hind brain. You're you're creating an emotional rush which bypasses the the forebrain, the logic. So you you might not see it. It might be done through kino. It might be done through proximity. It might be done through isolation. It might be done through smell. All these super super subtle things. Yeah? Discretion is one of the pillars of the secret society. Not just for smoothness of game, but perhaps she's got a husband. Perhaps she's got a boyfriend nearby. Perhaps her dad's nearby, perhaps her work colleagues are nearby. So don't fall into the trap of enjoying games so much that you become super flashy. I know it's a phase guys usually go through for the first six to twelve months. You're so proud of game that you wanna show off. I know guys that even wanna show off to the girl. That's called over gaming and I've done that in the past where you you know she's hooked, you know she's on the date, you know she's coming back to yours, but you think, I just wanna use the whole toolkit. So you do strawberry fields in the cube and think of a number and palm reading and dreams and every physical escalation step, you know, and she can tell that this is What's the definition of that? Try hard, you know, with the with the guy, who's getting laid all the time, who's a master seducer, would he have to do that? No. He gets it. Again, it's that I know that you know that I know vibe that I always talk about. Yeah? And really, that's in charismatic people. A long time ago, I made a podcast about charisma. I can't remember how long ago now. I think I was in Brazil. But I remember saying charisma is power plus warmth. And if you just half the equation, it doesn't work. So you'll notice charismatic people make people make other people do stuff. They make people follow, but they don't have to force them to do it. That's the warmth side of it. So if you just have power over somebody, you're a powerful person, that's not charisma. It's too obvious. The the frame is too obvious. Good frame control should be invisible. And the great Quentin Crisp, he said, charisma is the ability to influence without the use of logic. Charisma is the ability to influence without the use of logic. So therefore, you don't need to engage in these obvious vocal verbal frame battles. This is where guys trip up arguing with feminists online, you know, arguing with girls or trying to persuade her to kiss them or, talking to her like art of charm. And that's a charismatic person. You're not really sure why you're following them or doing what they say or buying that thing or going to hear them speak or the fact that you love that musician so much or that actor so much. There's that intangible quality, which is which is an emotional thing. It's under the radar and it's super subtle. Yep. So smooth game, definitely, definitely, definitely has warmth. And when you watch Richard Turner, the card mechanic, you'll see a beautiful patter he has as well to the people around the table. He has an incredible warmth. And flash game, you could say it's just power. It's just that guy in a sequined cape on the stage saying, look at me. Look at me. And, yeah, television loves him. And big stadiums, they love him. But if you've ever been to a gig, a very small gig, it might be a it might be a reading or it might be a musical gig or it might be a magic show. If you've been in a very intimate setting where you're just meters away from that person, fucking Alice, it's amazing. It's something that you can really respect. Anyway, to finish, a word that I shall leave you to look up and ponder. I think I'm pronouncing it correctly. It's Italian. Spresatura. Spresatura. I'm sure my Italian listeners will spank me for saying that wrong. But I think it's a very old Italian word for courtiers. When they used to say to a good courtier, he had to have that studied carelessness about him. In that you make a difficult thing look easy. So So you're not showing off to people, especially if they're your boss. Yeah. So just like a card shark does it, like a close-up magician does it. A courtier has this charisma about him without being, you know, mister know it all, mister show off, mister goody two shoes, mister perfect. He's making it look like he's not trying when in reality he's had to put in hundreds of hours of discipline to to do what he does. So a daygamer, yes, should have I know it applies to other things in other context, but I like that. And I hope I've inspired you to not just jump in front of girls and say you look nice, but think about the whole process of pickup. Think about the art and craft of daygame, and try and take your day game off the street into some of these secret environments. And when I come to your city this week, see if I can spot you or not on the street. It means you're bloody good if you're daygaming under the radar in stealth seduction mode. Alright. I'm gonna make some dinner inside the van, then I'll we'll upload this, and I will see the Dubliners tomorrow, which is Saturday September 22 7PM. O'Neil's details on the blog post below. Until next week goodbye