Recently, Kyle at This is Trouble released his new book, Cracking OKCupid.

He was kind enough to provide me with a review copy ahead of time, so I’d like to offer my two cents:

One of the first things I noticed about the book is there is a bullet point list of the main ideas of each chapter. It’s like skipping cut scenes in video games. Veterans of online game can skip ahead to the actionable advice and get started on applying soon not more than 5 or 10 minutes of reading the book. The novices, however, can still read the chapters as normal to see the “why” behind each main point so they truly understand what is going on. This makes the book accessible to all levels in game, something which is hard to do with these kinds of books.

Another thing that stood out to me was the suggestion to create a fake female profile to assess the competition. I made such a profile. I took about 10 minutes to find some obscure slavic model so that the average American man would be none the wiser even with a minimum amount of ‘Google Fu’. Model Mayhem provided me with Elmira Krakota and my imagination of a good red pill woman filled out the rest of the profile.

This is the profile after 5 hours.

Unfortunately, OKC banned me and my fake account (you can’t have more than one account on there) before I could take pictures of messaged from OKC. So here are a few samples from my email.

As you can see, the competition is not exactly fierce. The last time I looked at my fake account, she had 172 messages, over 600 visitors, and over 500 likes. Take that for what you will.

Thirdly, the book is comprehensive without going overboard. Kyle takes you through setting up your profile (every option is talked about), to giving you openers, to even giving advice on the initial meet up. However, rather than just giving you a fish for the day, Kyle teaches you how to fish. That is to say, he doesn’t give you that many openers, but explains the ones he does give. The point is not for you to pay for a bunch of canned openers and replies so much as to teach you the principles of a proper opener and witty replies so that you can make up your own and carry yourself forward instead of referring back to this book every time you get  message. That said, Kyle does not insult your intelligence by launching into too much detail about how you conduct yourself on the dates – he only addresses areas specific to the online dating world that might affect your date(s).

Cracking OKCupid is an absolute pleasure to read with some unintentional humor to go with good advice. I recommend you buy the book without reservation or bias*.

To Long/Didn’t Read?

At page 76 of 109, I already knew that this book was worth $20. If you want to bring your online game to the next level as a novice or intermediate, or tweak your game in ways you may not have thought of as advanced, you should buy this book.

Wald

*I do not receive a commission on the book, for I do not use affiliate links. The links refer you to Kyle’s page.