Social Falsification

Cheaters, especially those who deal with machines, have very little use for a poker face. In fact, most of their use for the poker face comes when they are close to being found out, which generally means that they haven’t been cheating that well.

For those that deal in cards, cups, or dice, however, the poker face is essential to survival. Most dealers can spot basic cheaters…and will be quick to call foul.

Unfortunately, practicing this kind of poker face is rather hard. You can’t very well go to a casino (even if it is out of time), intentionally cheat your ass off, and then expect everything to be okay — usually, by this point, you’re already in jail, or faced with heavy fines.

So how can good, honest cheaters come up with a way to hone their skills without avoiding police? There really isn’t a safe way that I’ve found, because, lets face it, of all of the Liar’s arts, cheating has the most ramifications for practice. So, for a person to become a really good cheater, I’d suggest practicing your skills more than your poker face, and, once you have them honed, starting with a low-stress, low-risk environment (like a boardwalk, or a bar) to ply your trade in. You might also want to go and do the PUA and C-Artistry exercises, because they will still make you slicker than you are.

Some general rules to live by, though:
-Practice your trade in a mirror. If you can see what you’re doing, then so can your dealer and fellow players.
-Your poker face is a whole body thing. Unless you have telekinesis, you want to make damn sure that security cameras and interested parties don’t even come close to suspecting you. Your best way to remain uncaught is to remain unnoticed. (There are exceptions to this, but we’ll get to that in the discussions on Peacocking).
-If a crack in your face is found, and someone accuses you of cheating, don’t panic…just keep playing for a bit, and play fair and square for a good long while, just in case.
-You will get better, both at your art, and the associated, ephemeral Poker Face, with time and training. Just don’t jump in over your head.

Thats all the advice I can really offer. Now, I know a good deal of you who read this are mostly silent, and email rather than comment, but I invite any cheaters who have better methods for practicing the poker face to speak up. This isn’t my primary area of expertise, and I’d rather you guys talk about how you might practice, for those just starting out who might read.

For now, however, I’m your host Lodinkinni, and this has been another presentation of Social Falsification: Tales from the Liar’s Underground. Tune in next time, when we begin talking about Peacocking, in all of its glorious forms.

Like the PUA, the C-Artist has a much more varied poker face than the traditional one. He must project a persona that will fool a mark, and will cause the mark to trust him. However, a PUA faces little more than a slap, should he screw up — a C-Artist, depending on his wares, and his mode of sales, may face anything up to and including his own death. Thus, the poker face becomes EXTREMELY important for his survival, as it is the most necessary tool for bluffing (to be discussed later, on its own).

There are actually two methods for practicing the C-Artist poker face, and which one is needed depends on the type of C-Artist. For Air Salesmen, the practicing is quite simple:

Step 1.) Watch a movie…any movie, really, so long as the characters are believable and modern.

Step 2.) Choose one of the characters…preferably one who you don’t resonate with at all…if you’re a skinny twerp who’s shy as a girl on her first period, pick the loud, bolsterous fat guy….but find a persona thats very, very, VERY far from your own. This will be your persona, and your poker face, for the main event.

Step 3.) Go to bumblefuck. Wherever it may be, it must be a no-nothing town, with little to no chance of you ever meeting someone that may actually be important in later schemes. Your objective here is to get 20 people interested in (insert type) of insurance. The catch? You must do it as the persona you picked up for step 2. Now, if you want to make it challenging, make sure the type of insurance is something useless…if you’re in a desert, flood insurance…if you’re in the NorthEast US, Earthquake insurance, etc, etc.

Step 4.) Continue finding people (on the streets, in stores, hell, door to door if you want), and trying to impress them, until you’ve met the qualification for your skill level:

Beginner goal: 20 People say yes and take down your number (A FAKE NUMBER—NOT A REAL ONE).
Intermediate (lower): 20 People, with a string of 3 in a row.
Intermediate (higher): 20 People, with a string of 5 in a row.
Advanced: 20 People, with a string of 10, and no more than 50 Approaches (restart count if you go over)
Mastery: 50 Person String. Start counting from scratch if someone doesn’t have interest, or if you break character.
Godlike: Actually take down SSNs, Phone Numbers, and Credit Card Numbers…use this drill as a way to fleece more people, and get better while doing it. 15 Person streak.

Now, of course, you have to remember to look for your mark’s interest. If they aren’t interested, and are just shooing you away by taking the number, then you’ve failed.

Dirt Salesmen:

You guys actually have a much easier way to practice your poker face: Sales. Your job is to pose as those most hated of demons, a door to door salesman. You will get all of your ‘merchandise’ at a dollar store, and try to sell it to whatever poor folk inhabit your bumblefuck.

Step 1 & 2.) Same as before, find a movie, choose a persona, its you.

Step 3.) Go to a dollar store. Find nice, compact things that you can sell from a briefcase.

Step 4.) Mark up the price by the following chart:

Beginner: 5 x the initial price of the item.
Intermediate (low): 8x the initial price of the item.
Intermediate (high):  10x  the initial price of the item.
Advanced: 15x the initial price of the item.
Mastery: 25x the initial price of the item.
God-Like: 50x the initial price. And a Catch: Pretend that you’re taking orders for larger quantities, and that these are just your sample wares. If you can sell a 1 dollar item at 50 times its price, and get people to invest money in multiples of the item, then the practice has more or less paid off.
Step 5.) Get at least 20 people to buy at your increased price, while maintaining your persona.

Thats all for the practice routines today, folks. Tune in next time when I report on this past week’s installment of the Pick Up Game.

For now, I’m your host, Lodinkinni, and this has been another presentation of ‘Social Falsification: Tales From The Liar’s Underground’.  Good Luck, And Good Night.

Now, there are a million and one ways to practice your poker face, and a million and two poker faces to practice. For the sake of this blog (at least for now), we’ll be dealing with the natural poker face: i.e. continuing your persona regardless of what happens. I’ll give a few different methods here, and notate what set of Liars each one is best suited for. Of course, you can practice any of them, or all of them, if you just want to become better at keeping your emotions to yourself in general, but…some work better for some groups, others for others. During this post, I’ll go over the PUA poker face, the next post will be the C-Artistry poker face, and then, finally, the Cheater’s poker face.

PUA POKER FACE:
The main objective of the PUA’s poker face is to stop AMOGs, bitch tests, or AA from visibly getting a rise out of you. You want to be able to keep your frame intact, and your control of the situation absolute at all times…thus, you can’t really give someone the ‘I’m gonna kill you you fucking bitch, you’re such a god damn whore’ look in the middle of a set, now can you?

The best, and I mean BEST practice, comes in the field, when dealing with women. So, to practice your poker face: Go outside your normal prowl zone….give yourself a good….I dunno…20 to 30 mile distance from your regular grounds. Go to a bar, and begin to sarge. Now, here’s the catch: Instead of trying to pick up women, try to convince them that you’re gay, and looking for company. Place your persona as near as you can to the frame you’re in while sarging, but don’t hit on the girl. While doing it, you want to be as embarassingly open about ‘your gayness’ as you can, without being outright flamboyant. Talk about other mens asses, talk about the way they walk, etc, etc. (If you’re really uncomfortable with being gay…try going to camden, and pretending you’re a neo-nazi, or go to a lesbian bar, and be a chauvinistic pig…you know…just go do something thats the exact opposite of you). Don’t make any closes, don’t even attempt to close. You just want to talk to them about other mens chests.

Pause here. Many of you are probably blinking, shaking your heads, or calling me full of shit by now. But its okay…I am crazy. What you’re doing, by setting yourself up like this, is exploring the polar opposite of your normal situation…while attempting to maintain the same frame of mind, and the same persona that you do while out sarging. If you take ten approaches with this, and by the end of it, don’t end up cracking up at your own actions, then you’ve gone a good way towards getting that poker face going.

Step two is pretty similar, but much harder. For this, leave the bar you’re at, and change locale. For this next place, you’re going to be completely honest…and I don’t mean ‘honest if she asks you’ honest, I mean honest honest. Tell the girls that you approach that you’re
a PUA, and explain to them everything. Now, some PUAs do this already….and if you’re one of them, and good enough to call yourself a PUA and not an RAFC, then you most likely don’t need this part of the practice. For the rest of you, the goal is to get a close (any kind…but K-closes are kinda cheap here, so I encourage #, @, and F-closes. Remember, despite being brutally honest (and not just about yourself…no pick up lines about her hair, her eyes…anything like that, unless they REALLY strike you.), you have to maintain your usual persona and frame. That pretty much should do it for the night’s practice. I recommend doing these things until you can take the most ridiculous and the most stressful situations in stride.

ADVANCED: For those of you that can already do these things, but still want to up your game a bit:

-Try aiming only at girls with boyfriends (with them). Or married women. All other rules remain the same as above, but this’ll up the chances of dealing with AMOGs and aggression directly.

-Try it at a place other than a bar/club/normal watering hole. Go to an office building and try and pick up the secretary, etc, etc.

Regardless of if you do the advanced work, this practice will make your general game better, and will let you keep your poker face/persona through just about anything the real world may throw at you.

For now, I’m your host Lodinkinni, and you’ve been reading another post from ‘Social Falsification: Tales from the Liar’s Underground’. Tune in next time when I link the challenge I’ll be setting up (on mASF) for these practices, and then, immediately afterwards, for ‘Practicing the Poker Face, Part II’. Good night, and Good Luck.

Recommended Websites:
 http://theplayboyway.blogspot.com/: This is a blog from a fellow PUA. A pretty damn good one. Unlike a lot of those skill-intensive people, he’s still got the love of the game. And thats important as hell. So…check him out, and learn to relax a bit.

There is nothing so universally necessicary as the poker face. No matter what form of lying you practice, or what type of social manipulation you’re working (they’re both the same thing, really. Pick whichever one your conscience prefers), the poker face is always, always, ALWAYS needed.

Now, there are some misconceptions about the poker face, to be sure. In the minds of some, its a cold, clear tactic, devoid of any and all expression. To others, its any directly misleading face, that stops the true nature of a person’s intent from being visible. Everyone agrees, however, that a poker face, however you define it, is key to keeping your mark/target/HB11 from realizing exactly what you’re up to.

Pick Up Artists: Your poker face is the face of your persona. When you walk out there, exuding confidence, a poker player’s poker face isn’t going to help you much. But making your visible emotions and reactions match that personality you’ve worked so hard to obtain: priceless.

C-Artists: Your poker face may be emotionally charged, and really varies depending on what you’re selling. If your clients see you as being anything other than what they want to see you as, you’re toast.

Cheaters: Yours is the original, the basic poker face. No emotion: Stone Cold. You don’t want anyone to know what you’re up to, or know that you have any part in the roulette wheel stopping at 7 red every round. You just jumped on it and got lucky. That hand of 7 aces? Yeah. Gotta keep your hand up, your eyes narrow, and your voice silent.

I’m your host Lodinkinni, and this has been another presentation of ‘Social Falsification: Tales From The Liar’s Underground.’ Our next few posts will be something of a departure from the norm, but once they’ve been completed, we’ll resume with ‘Practicing the Poker Face.’