Making Banker Game Totally Unstoppable

The Zola System In Action

 

I opened the New York Post on Saturday to laugh at the latest sexual misadventures of one of our national leaders.  This time, it was John Edwards issuing a mea culpa over an affair and possible love child while his wife was stricken with cancer.  (Between Kwame and Edwards, it hasn’t been a good week for the Democrats.  But fear not, my readers who are on the left of the spectrum.  I’m sure the Republicans have a few more Larry Craig’s somewhere in the fold.)  On the front page of the Pulse section, there it was, a feature column entitled ‘How To Frolic Like A Finance Guy’ and is one of the best examples of the Zola System in action I have found in print.

 

The article is promulgated on Amit Chatwani’s satirical website www.leveragedsellout.com and the book he has written (released this month) entitled ‘Damn, It Feels Good To Be A Banker.’  Chatwani and reporter Justin Robert Silverman put on the front of being a banker in order to meet/pick-up women.  It even includes a list of ten things one needs to ‘roll’ like a banker.  Impressive to say the least, although the women pass and then leave at the crucial moment.

 

Fascinating but in the final examination, I have to say their ‘game’, based solely on the artifice of being a banker, is 2 dimensional and fatally flawed.  Not being any where near a great ladies man myself, in fact I can be socially awkward and down right eccentric from time to time, I compare Chatwani and Silverman’s attempt to an old friend nicknamed Chicko and his escapades in the realm of picking up women.

 

Chicko is a former male model, an occasionally working graphic artist and day trader whose life revolves around the quest to get laid.  For men, the state of constant erection ends around the age of 28.  It usually coincides with the realization that we want to have a family and hanging out at clubs and bars to all hours is counter productive to that end.  For Chicko, if he wasn’t getting laid, he was working to get laid. 

 

My favorite of his getting laid hustles went like this:  he’d walk into several bars until he found one with several groups of women sitting around chatting.  Chicko would make a point to come back in a few days running and scope out one group of women that frequented the joint, usually a group of two girlfriends having a glass of wine, one very attractive, his target, and the other not as pretty.  Once Chicko had found his mark, he’d buddy up with the bartender and find out all he could about both women: when they came into the place, what they did for a living, where they were from etc.  If they were risk analysts, who liked Dolce Gabbana and were old girlfriends from Reston, Virginia, he would spend a day or two studying about risk analysis, Dolce Gabbana and Reston, Virginia.  Chicko would bide his time, drinking at the joint until his mark came in, then he’d buy both women a drink and strike up a conversation, with his mark’s friend.  He’d keep up this animated chat and watch as his mark went from curious to jealous. 

 

“I am playing on her jealousy.  I want them to think ‘I’m so much better looking than my girlfriend.  I get all the attention from all the boys.  Why isn’t he talking to me?’  Once her friend went to the bathroom, the girl I want slides into her friends seat and picks up the conversation.”  He told me.  “I always walk away with either the girl or her phone number.”

 

What if she isn’t the jealous type or isn’t interested?

 

“Then I still have her friend reeled in.”

 

What strikes me most about his approach to meeting/picking up women is just how much of a hustler, not a seducer, Chicko is.  He follows the ever important Hustler’s Rule of Three: 

 

1. Identify your mark. 
2. Find out everything you can about the mark.  Preparation, preparation, preparation.
3. When running the hustle, be prepared to change any part of the program on a dime.   

 

Chatwani and Silverman have rule three covered but have completely missed out on numbers one and two.  Banker game could become totally unstoppable with a little bit of the Zola System thrown in.