Smash hit

I get it out eventually, while the girls stare at me like I’m some sort of stammering sex pest. Back at the table, Strauss tells me where I went wrong. I missed the “time constraint” at the beginning (“I have to get back to my friends”), which would have relaxed them and removed their fear that I’d be plaguing them all night. Then

I asked for their attention, rather than simply announcing that I needed it. Plus, I got all the words wrong. “I’ve seen worse,” he says.

Five or six girls and a bar later, I’m starting to get the hang of it. If you have your eye on a particular girl in a set, PUA wisdom states that you should ignore her at the expense of her friends. This should make her feel left out, and start to clamour for your attention.

After a while, slightly surprisingly, we are joined in our sarging quest by Daniel Ryan, the guitarist from rock group The Thrills. In his other life, Neil Strauss is a rock journalist, writing for Rolling Stone and The New York Times. He claims to have used PUA techniques in an interview with Britney Spears. He quit the PUA life when he met his current girlfriend, Lisa Leveridge, who plays guitar for Courtney Love. They’ve just moved in together, in LA. Ryan last saw Strauss on a night out in LA, along with Strauss’s own guru, a legendary PUA called Mystery. “That was just astonishing,” he reminds him. “Mystery had that girl in the toilets in like, five minutes. And her boyfriend was still at the bar.”

There are advanced techniques, I’m told, for dealing with rivals, boyfriends and even husbands – the Alpha Male of the Group, or AMOG. “AMOGing” is entirely negative, designed to usurp a rival male by goading him into deferring to your superiority. Hard slaps on the back are a favourite trick. Strauss himself created “Stylemogging”, a more subtle technique in which one uses barbed compliments to establish oneself as the supreme arbitrator of whatever is under discussion. “You’ve got better at that, a bit,” is apparently a classic Stylemogging comment. At this level, it all starts to get a little scary.

Mystery is the inventor of a concept called the “neg”. One negs a girl by showing her “active disinterest” – basically by being a little rude. Ridicule her, very slightly, in front of her friends. The best negs happen in response to IOIs (see above). If somebody asks you your name or your job, simply tell them they are being nosy and move on. I try my first neg on the very drunk blonde friend of an equally drunk Irish girl from whom Puma is extracting a phone number by the Sanderson Hotel bar. I forget exactly what I say, but it makes her start crying. About her ex-boyfriend. “I think your negs are a little strong,” says Strauss. “Also, avoid drunks.”

Mystery also invented a concept called “peacocking”. To peacock, a sarger must essentially dress like a rock star, in the most outlandishly confident manner that he possibly can. For night two, I decide to wear jeans, a leather jacket, a white dress-shirt and a thin black tie. Certainly, I feel my confidence growing. Although I feel like a bit of a tit on the Tube.

Night two gets off to a good start. Strauss makes us each open a few times to get our confidence up, and then we move on to more advanced techniques. We learn how to “demonstrate higher value”, to show that we are not just oddly dressed freaks with interesting dilemmas, but fascinating people with a wealth of interesting chat. There’s the Best Friends Test, in which you quiz girls about their brand of shampoo. There’s the Numbers Quiz, in which you pretend, in an isn’t-this-nuts kind of way, to read a girl’s mind. And to top them all, there’s The Cube, a psychological game in which you ask a girl a bunch of weird questions about objects sitting in the desert, and then describe her own personality back to her.

Midway through all of this, we are joined by a British PUA called Magnus, who has heard that Strauss is in town. “Do you use The Cube?” Strauss asks him. “All the f***ing time,” says Magnus, gravely. Magnus has four girls on the go in different parts of the world. He looks like a frog.

By the end of The Cube, your target should be enthralled. “Never hit on a woman,” says Strauss, “until she is attracted to you.” By now, she should be. In order to move things along, and “go kino” (get physical) we learn something called the “Evolution Phase Shift”. It’s a long, convoluted routine, progressing from hair-pulling, to touching, to biting, and ultimately to kissing. Normally, I’d never believe it would work. After meeting Magnus, though, I’ll believe anything.

After a little more practise, my “game” is improving dramatically. I can open with fluency, and there’s an injection of confidence which comes from knowing exactly what you are going to say next. And my negs are improving. Nobody cries. When one girl asks me what I do for a living, I tell her I scavenge in dustbins. Strauss approves. Ultimately though, we students only know two openings. There’s a limited amount of time we can spend in any one bar.

We end up in Mayfair’s Funky Buddha. Strauss has briefed us to look at nobody as we enter the bar. Beautiful women – of which there are many – must be utterly ignored. We must concentrate only on each other, so as to give the impression that we are the most fascinating, intriguing party in the whole nightclub. We do. People stare. It seems to be working.

Explore Women

• Fashion

• Beauty

• Diet & Fitness

• Relationships

• Families

• Celebrity

• The Way We Live

• Horoscopes

Times recommends

• How I lost the gift of joy for a while
• How to get Coleen Rooney's post-baby body
• The A-Z of winter style rules