Daygame Coaching Experience Review: Thomas Crown, Riga (In-Person)

Lead-Up

I had some awesome coaching a week ago with Thomas Crown in Riga, Latvia.

I’d come across Tom’s website while binge-reading articles across the internet about seduction artistry.

He wasn’t coaching then, and I didn’t vibe with his site (maybe because it didn’t have pictures of pretty girls like Krauser’s—haha!—but in all fairness, my bullshit detector was set on a hair-trigger by potentially gimmicky sites when I couldn’t tell beneficial/true game advice from detrimental/uninformed fantasies, and only had my academic website research experience to go on).

Recently I heard Tom’s name a couple times from Breeze when we went out in Krakow, and Breeze said Tom was one of the best lads he knew for Daygame.

So when I heard Tom would be doing coaching in Riga (having heard good things about the city from guys like Joe the photographer), I saw the opportunity to see Riga and learn in person.

During the intake call, where we confirmed my status as a beginner¹, Tom seemed like a relaxed, cool guy, like a knowledgable patient uncle, assuaging my fears and previous worries based on his website’s look.

We met in person the day before the actual coaching, letting us ease into it. That meeting proved a useful experience; I learned how fishing for evening sets “works” as I observed Wolfe Daygame and Tom do sets and identify the approachability of the travelers and lovely Latvian girls passing by. I mused how this is one rare hobby when we hope not to see each other again soon when we part² ways.

Concepts I’d never discovered up until this meet arose while we talked and occasionally greeted the affable passerby. Considering how “approachable” a girl might be to an approach, based on how she’s dressed and how she’s walking, isn’t something I considered seriously³ until after sharing beers with Tom and Wolfe. Related is the concept of experience vs. status girls, mentioned in a later section.

Neither idea is pertinent toward the question of who I should approach right now (I’m a beginner and I ought to gain more daygame experience with all kinds of girls), unless I find myself in conditions where I can afford to be picky (an environment with too many sets)⁴.

Coaching Proper

The coaching was relaxed and felt low-pressure. As a beginner who’d heard the phrase “London Daygame Model” (or LDM) but never formally studied it, Tom and I found it instructive for him to explain concepts while we walked around between sets that I noticed, or that he pointed out. He was open to letting me do sets as I saw them or giving me a boost, whichever I preferred. I weaseled out of a lot of possible sets, however.

Tom is authoritative but leads in a non-authoritarian way. It was easy to see he’d be good with girls before I even saw him open a set (though he demonstrated a few times when he got a strong signal of interest from a girl—time in set he makes up later, to give the mentee his full paid time). This is a good sign to me, for a coach. It’s also an attitude I’d like to adopt.

Tom gave on-point feedback for my sets, and much of the feedback was along similar veins, cumulating into sticking points we later discussed. As someone who’s seen plenty⁵ of daygame breakdowns and read plenty⁶ of material on what constitutes “good” game, I recognized that the sticking points were on the money—sometimes I’d ask why, or be momentarily confused by the precise phrasing Tom used (I’m American, he’s a London guy), or in the case of some new concepts (like the status vs experience girl archetypes) need further explanation, most of it fit within the framework of what I already understood as “necessary” or “important” for game, with a few surprises⁷.

Tom sent me notes he took that included some personalized points for me to work on, in addition to practicing a proper Daygame model (albeit a simple one). Tom’s coaching, for me as a beginner, as well as for others in the beginner or intermediate phases, is useful not only for the coaching itself, but the trajectory that follows from feedback. I have a starting point, specific parts to work on, a specific simple model⁸, and a plan for what I’ll do when I return home to the ‘States in a figurative desert of set-less-ness. I will, over time, add nightgame to daygame.

Tom talked about all kinds of things and it was really cool for me to get to ask a daygaming coach specific questions about lifestyle and game. It seems a large part of what leads me into further interest and engagement with this community is talking with the cool guys I meet along the way about game, life, work, and so on, not merely my personal interest in getting good at spreading legs. I hope I’m not motivated “too much” by desire to be part of a community—but that’s likely part of it. Writing my player blog has been marvelous and you should write one too.

I want to live game as a lifestyle, and, knowing how slow change can be, I’m learning more and more that choice of job, desire to build one’s own business, where one lives, hobbies one indulges or nurtures, preferences for venue, and the kinds of experiences all factor into what kind of lifestyle game one could build. There’s no single right answer, but finding jobs that allow for flexibility and leaving work at work seem like good starting points to avoid being broke/having no time to practice cold approach.

Outside of coaching, Tom was also warm and open to inviting me along to other things like grabbing a beer—an almost mythical mundane experience, intriguing because of its novelty to me, where for many in this space it may be a regular occurrence. Tom was an enabler of future success, moreso than a mere in-the-moment mentor. I respect—and I’m greatly appreciative to—him for that.

Some of his feedback focused around my energy in the start of a set: I should come in excited, and calibrate to about one level higher than the girl’s energy, and not be so laid back like a guy who doesn’t care. I should ask some basic get-to-know-you questions and use assumptions to get into them. Too many questions feel like an interview, but cold reads are fun. I need to stop her with dominant presence rather than having a weak or half-hearted open. I need to avoid going into the conversation until I’ve stopped her fully, using body language and strong eye contact to focus on her. I need to get close enough that the moment feels intimate and touch isn’t a giant leap, and I can be less stiff by moving around, especially with an arm or hand.

Most of this post has been focused around my experience of Tom’s Coaching as opposed to the coaching itself, so to rectify that…

In Summary

The coaching is more than I expected from a game coach, and Tom cares about helping you towards your goals, calibrating his coaching to your experience level. To someone who had about 300-350 lifetime approaches, and generally a beginner with no lifetime lays, Tom gave me pertinent advice not only for daygame but other areas of life. Overall, Tom’s a cool guy and someone worth getting instruction from if you’re looking for a coach in Europe and plan to be one of the areas he’ll be in on his trips, or in London.

Caveats: if you think the seduction arts can be played as a sideline sport or without putting your ego on the line, this coaching won’t be for you. If your ego is too big to accept advice or act on it, or you’re only in the U.S. (or on some non-Europe continent), I wouldn’t recommend Tom so much as more accessible options closer to home. Or if Online or Nightgame or social circle game is all you care about, this probably won’t help you towards those ends.

But for those living in Europe who now sit on the fence, whether intermediates looking to move past long-time sticking points or newbies who haven’t even started approaching, I’d recommend this guy as a good option to get you on the right track for Daygame.

“My Notes” from mid-experience

I wrote a lot of notes during the coaching, too many to put here. Some are straight out of the advice Tom gives to the beginners he coaches, while others are my own insights or paraphrasing.

• Books to add to my to-read list: Daygame Nitro, Daygame Mastery, Daygame Infinite (only when I’m deep intermediate) (All by Krauser), Daygame, Street Hustle (Tom Torrerro)
• Make the simplest approach possible and practice it while working on the important non-verbals
• Get her to STOP before going into the opener
• Think of the simplest set like a sandwich: opener-content-close, bun-filling-bun
• Push-pull matters less than fundamentals -> fundamentals first, be forward in the meantime
• I AM TALKING TO THIS GIRL BECAUSE I WANT TO PUT MY SAUSAGE IN HER HOTDOGBUN
• Don’t bother with a 100-set day, it’s more likely to lead to burnout and be spam approaching than if you did 20 in one day or 100 in a week. 30 sets a week for a year is more consistently doable
• If a girl says she’s not interested or has a BF, it’s worth trying a second time by ignoring and continuing, then calibrating off if she says so a second time
• For a cool multi-country travel plan, I could try alternating Serbia for 3 months then Poland for 3 months to balance my visa logistics (90 day limit in the EU)
• Homework exercise: Record sets, put aspects (like studies economics, is blonde, went to college, is from France, etc.) I hear about the girl onto note cards, then put 3 jokes on the other side, and try to recall those + add new jokes when I think of them, so I build up a repertoire I can bring out in the middle of a set
• Homework exercise 2: make a color-word association mental bank
• Use subtle cues like eye contact matched with physical touch in the right moments to signal covertly that you want to fuck her, when you can, instead of overt
• status vs experience girls – applicable for daygame, not something worth worrying about for online – status girls being girls who care a lot about their status and e.g. how they are seen by others, and experience girls being more focused on having experiences and caring less about fitting into the status hierarchies by e.g. dressing well (I don’t think I did a good job of explaining it, but this is the basic premise and I know Krauser explores more of it, according to a recent tweet by Nash)

When I (someday) visit London, I hope to hit these guys up and hang out on the streets, picking up girls, talking about game, and enjoying the experience more than feeling nervous about my ability to live up to the daygame spirit.

Keep Rolling.⁹

1. albeit with some piecemeal theory bouncing around in the head ↩︎
2. i.e. someone’s going to try their luck on a set ↩︎
3. Though Breeze seemed to do the same ↩︎
4. Though the experience/status scale and judging which sets are more viable seem to be useful distinctions to train myself on. I’ll “build my intuition” for them, as the mathematically inclined might say. ↩︎
5. read: too many ↩︎
6. read: too much ↩︎
7. no, my knowledge isn’t perfect even after reading most of RedQuest’s prolific blog and dozens of videos and articles promising to explain aspects of picking up/attracting/seducing women ↩︎
8. one of my difficulties in the past has been not knowing what to say in the set and hoping I can cold-read something on the spot; I’ve read Nash’s post on using logistics as your “stack” i.e. to build the conversation before, but I sucked at implementing it and the model Tom gave me to practice relieves that pressure and satisfies the basic logistic questions at the same time ↩︎
9. I wonder if, given my proclivity towards writing reviews here after getting coaching, this blog could become more useful as a “reviews” or verification resource than actual seduction arts advice… but nobody was coming here for my game insights anyway (right? …if you were, you should read Nash and RedQuest, and if you’ve got the time, give Thomas Crown’s website a look). I want to eventually get Karisma King and/or A.G. Hayden’s coaching (Nightgame) input, and will write a review here if I do so. Maybe I’ll get Nash’s coaching at some point, I heard he started doing so recently—but first, I want/need to take action on what I’ve already learned, and make progress with that. ↩︎