Bardamu’s Bookbag: Bang and Day Bang

Back at it again. Remember to check out the rest of my reviews here. If you want me to review your book, email me here.

In this edition of Bardamu’s Bookbag, I’m reviewing Roosh’s Bang and Day Bang. Some of you are probably thinking, “But Ferd, you reviewed Bang two years ago! Why are you looking at it again?” I’ve got two reasons:

1. My review was of the first edition of Bang, released way back in 2007. This review is of Roosh’s expanded second edition, released last year.
2. You need to read Bang and understand its fundamentals in order to get the most out of Day Bang. Roosh says as much in the opening paragraphs. While you can still make use of Day Bang if you haven’t read Bang, reading the latter first will make your journey that much easier.

I was also planning on reviewing the second edition of A Dead Bat in Paraguay, but I’m holding off on that one until next week.

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Bang by Roosh V

To keep this post short, I’m going to stick to covering the new features in the second edition of Bang. For my complete look at the first edition, read my previous review here.

There’s a reason why, after over two years of running a self-hosted site, Roosh’s books are the only game products I endorse. Whenever one of my friends comes to me for advice on women, whether he’s having difficulty approaching or getting bitched out by his girlfriend, I tell him to read Roosh and the Chateau every day. If possible, I let him look at my dog-eared paperback copy of Bang. I used to also suggest The Mystery Method for guys, but not any more – for straight game advice, it’s Bang all the way.

Even with all the changes in American nightlife in the past few years, Bang has stood the test of time because it’s both simple and comprehensive. There are no esoteric terms to learn, no pages of lines to memorize, and no complicated routines to perfect. Any man, from a cubicle drone to a college student, can pick up Bang, comprehend it, and use it in the bars that very same night. And unlike its competitors, the book analyses every detail of the seduction process, from the approach to getting her naked in the bedroom.

The second edition of Bang has three big additions that make it an even more worthwhile buy:

1. A section on going out alone (or solo dolo if you want to get G Manifesto about it) in the Early Game chapter.
2. A complete guide to text messaging girls in the Middle Game chapter.
3. “The Six Most Important Game Principles,” aka the Bang Cheat Sheet, which was originally offered as a bonus for anyone who bought Bang Colombia. This is at the very end of the book.

Additionally, the book’s prose has been cleaned up a bit by a professional editor, with typos and run-on sentences (mostly) gone.

From the average man’s perspective, the most helpful feature in the new Bang is the texting guide. In my previous review, I glossed this over because the book was written before texting became a thing, when girls still preferred phone calls. Fast-forward to 2011 – in the past couple years, I can count the number of phone conversations I’ve had with girls I was seeing on just my two hands. If you’re having trouble in this department, Bang will definitely help you out.

The section on going out without a wingman is most helpful if you live in a big city and/or you travel a lot. While my job has me on the road frequently, rolling solo dolo back home has limited utility because I live in a small city where everyone is at least familiar with each other (one of my friends who grew up here describes going out as like “an extended high school reunion”). Still, Roosh does a great job of covering all the angles here, detailing not only what you should do when you actually hit the town to how you should prepare beforehand, getting yourself into a social mood by talking to people all day before you hit the clubs that night (“The last thing you want to do is go out alone after jerking off on the internet all day”).

The Bang Cheat Sheet, while a bit superfluous, does a good job of summing the book’s principles up in six easy steps, a nice refresher after 200 some-odd pages. Overall, while I’m not sure if it’s worth buying again if you already own the first edition of Bang, if you HAVEN’T bought it already and you’re looking to improve your game, you’d be crazy to not pick this up.

Click here to buy Bang.

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Day Bang by Roosh V

This book got a lot of praise when it was released a couple months back, some of it borderline hagiographic. And frankly I’m kicking myself for not getting to it earlier, because there’s a lot of truth to the hype. Day Bang is literally a product unlike any other in the world of game and seduction. You NEED to have this one in your library, else you’re missing out on the only way to pick up women without having to deal with cockblockers, bitch shields and the other annoying aspects of nightlife.

Day Bang could just as easily be titled “How to Be an Interesting Conversationalist,” since that’s what day game is — chatting up strange women and making them so interested in you that they want to get to know you better. The fundamental difference between night game and day game is that the former is an erotically charged environment; despite their claims of hating being leered at and approached, girls subconsciously expect and WANT men to pick them up at the bars and clubs. During the day, girls aren’t in an erotic mood; attempting to run night game on them is like trying to kill a mouse with TNT. Roosh uses a similar analogy:

When it comes to game, the best analogy I can give you is that at night girls are like dogs while during the day they’re like cats. When you’re at a bar you can stand close to a girl, talk in her ear, go on with long-winded cocky routines, touch often, or jam your cock between her ass cheeks. Any of these things would freak a girl out during the day and lead to a guaranteed rejection or ejection from the public venue.

If you’ve ever visited a house with a cat, I’m sure you know what happens when you immediately run up to it. It freaks out, hides under the bed, and doesn’t come out for several hours. What you have to do instead is sit on the couch, pretend the cat isn’t even there, and wait for it to come closer. First it sits in the same room as you, and then it casually rubs your leg with its tail. Finally it meows at your face, asking to be petted. If you’ve done a good job, the cat will “reward you” by laying on its back so you can stroke its belly.

Because of this, Day Bang’s method is a toned-down extension of the Bang model, revolving around augmenting your existing conversational abilities rather than dropping stale one-liners. Roosh covers every aspect imaginable, from the logistics of approaching in various locations from the coffee shop to the supermarket, to how you should structure your conversations with girls so that they become intrigued by your personality, to overcoming approach anxiety. I particularly like how he correctly identifies approach anxiety as narcissism with swipes like “no one gives a fuck about you.”

Day Bang isn’t magic, though. Roosh is upfront about the nature of approaching being a numbers game, stating that only a minority of girls are open to being chatted up. He also repeatedly stresses that a large part of your success rate is determined by how interesting you are as a person — your job, your hobbies, your travels, how well-read you are etc. While a basement-dwelling fat boy CAN get laid with enough persistence and effort, in the “million monkeys banging on a million typewriters for a million years” sense, you’re unnecessarily handicapping yourself if you don’t improve your own life first. Fortunately, since the highlight of most guys’ lives is watching sports on TV and beating off in the shower, you don’t need to put in Herculean efforts to change who you are — you just need to be a cut above the rest.

For example, I’m a musician. At least one night a week, I’m up on stage strumming my Stratocaster and playing at being a rock star. One of the bands I play with has been fairly successful, and I actually get paid for playing with them. As a result, I have a ever-expanding repository of stories to tell girls, like when that drunk guy threw a beer bottle at me while we were playing that dive bar in St. Albans. I also travel a lot owing to my job, so I can also ramble at length about the places I’ve been and the people I’ve met, like about how a guy asked to take a picture of my T-shirt at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

Virgins Haters Critics of game claim that it’s about pretending to be someone you aren’t, but if I were post verbatim the “lines” and routines I use to pick up girls, no one else would be able to replicate them. I’m not dropping corny lines or dressing like a colorblind retard — I’m simply relating the things I’ve done, experienced or read about in a way that makes girls more interested in me. No one else can get girls exactly the way I do because you’re not me; you haven’t seen the things I’ve seen or done the things I’ve done. You can, however, learn to get girls by tapping into your own strengths as a man. At its core, game is just good salesmanship, with the product you’re selling being yourself and the experience of being with you.

Day Bang ain’t perfect, though. The biggest criticism I’d level at it is that it doesn’t go beyond the mechanics of approaching and talking to girls, unlike the comprehensiveness of Bang. That’s why I said at the beginning of the post that you need to read Bang to get the most out of Day Bang. Still, given the unique nature of Day Bang, recycling material from Bang would probably have diluted the book’s effectiveness, so this is a very minor ding.

Roosh understands that game is just salesmanship, which is why Bang and Day Bang will stand the test of time, unlike *other* seduction guides. There’s no fear of the lines or methods becoming stale or ineffective, because they’re nothing more than efficient, effective ways of presenting each man’s personality and life experience. That’s all they’re designed to do — you have to fill in the gaps yourself in the way only YOU know how. The only way day game will ever cease to work is if women suddenly decide they no longer want to date interesting, talented and exceptional men — and what’s the likelihood of that happening?

This is why you need to own Day Bang. You are without excuse — get out of the house and talk to a cutie today. You’ll both be better off for it.

Click here to buy Day Bang.

Tagged as: Bang, Day Bang, Roosh