So let me introduce you to this. You've maybe heard of Montreal international Jazz Festival but there are many other free music festivals almost all summer long here and there's always tons of people. I find it one of the perfect environment for practicing gaming skills because there's so much people that you'll find every type of girl, and if the set doesn't go well you just eject and open an other one very easily.

The current festival is "Francofolies" which consists of outdoor french songs shows. I went there yesterday with two buddies and we kept approaching consistently all night long. Our focus was to open, outcome was unimportant.

It's crowded like this every night.

A fun opener we used was asking to groups of girls while pointing to the signer on the stage: "Who the fuck is this guy?" (when the guy is an obvious national star everybody knows).

The most common openers were situational, relating to the event/signers/music/people. "I lost my friends", "Which show is worth going to?", "How was the last show you saw?", "Damn this is so loud, my head hurts, doesn't yours?", "Canucks lost."

It is usually damn hard to get to the front of the stage because everybody wants to be close but we managed to get to the front every time by showing dominant body language (head up, eye contact, acting like we knew where we were going even though we were just trying to make our way through).

When making our way through to the front of the crowd, we looked at girls in the eyes and stopped when the girl kept eye contact and smiled: she obviously wants you to talk to her and it's always a good set.

People in this type of event tend to be very social. We were even opened by a couple of sets of girls. One was just a group of drunk girls that led nowhere, but the second one was more interresting:

We were in a line-up to get food and beer, standing just behind a HB7 and a HB8. HB7 turns around and tells me that we can order and they were just talking to their waitress friend behind the counter.

Me to HB7: So you were blocking us and you're not gonna order anything?

HB7: Well, we wanted to eat pizza but... (I interrupt)

Me to my friends, playfully: Hey, she says she's buying us pizza.

The girls giggled and I stepped away from the line to chat with them. My friends ordered while I was entertaining the set. When they came back at us, I acted like I now knew the girls and intoduced my friends to them using made-up names (at that point they hadn't told me their names). They giggled and proceeded to tell us their real names.

When the food kiosk closed, their HB9 waitress friend brought us free food and we kept chatting for a couple of minutes. We were now 3 girls and 3 guys but when they said they were leaving, we didn't have the reflex to exchange numbers and failed to close. Looking back at this, I think it would have been very easy to close but we just kind of froze up.

I hope my english isn't too bad, I just wanted to share about gaming in big social events. Any suggestions of things to try in this type of event? The attitude to take from this: just have fun, don't overthink it, be outcome-independant, stop fearing about being rejected (if you are rejected, you just leave and open an other set).