Summary: I came up with a half-baked analogy between poker and the escalation techniques used to create "it just happened" sexual situations. I want to know if it checks out with other people's experiences.

Body: Plausible deniability is a common topic that I've seen on this subreddit. Often the phrase "it just happened" is thrown out as a touchstone; if you keep plausible deniability alive, then a woman will always be able to tell others (and herself) that "it just happened", which is to say that no one in particular can be held responsible. I've seen lots of people hold this up as an ideal or even a requirement for success, but relatively few people offering theories about A) how to maintain plausible deniability, and B) when to discard it in favor of a more direct line. Here's my stab at part A of that.

In poker, you represent the strength of your hand to other players by betting. You're communicating to them that your hand belongs to the set of hands which would make sense with that bet. As the game progresses, you build a story with your bets, and you slowly narrow the range of hands you might possibly be claiming to have.

One key goal is to keep your story coherent. If you make a bet late in the game which only makes sense for a hand you already ruled out with your earlier bets, it throws up alarm bells for the other players. Another key goal is to make the range you're representing incentivize your opponent to play the way YOU want him to. If your range narrows down to a handful of extremely strong possibilities, there's a good chance that your opponent will fold -- so don't narrow your range like that unless you want him to fold. The last point I'll note is that in general, the narrower your range becomes, the better informed your opponent is about what you're holding.

OK, now the shitty explanation of poker is out of the way. Here's the connection to dating/flirting/pickup/whatever. When you first approach a girl, you represent a range of outcomes you're interested in by keeping things somewhat vague. If sex is one of your end goals, though, you should make sure to include that in your range from the very start, because otherwise it will be much more difficult to keep things coherent. Her response will also represent a certain range of outcomes that she's interested in. As things progress, both of your ranges will narrow until there are only one or two outcomes that both people are interested in. The game as I see it would be to try and arrange things so that your story always stays coherent, you manage your range in a way that guides the interaction towards the outcomes you like the best, and (if possible) you persuade her to narrow her range faster than you narrow yours. Plausible deniability is basically keeping your range open so that she never has to explicitly agree to sex in order to continue interacting with you in a coherent way.

Conclusion: Looking for input on this idea.

  1. Does it seem true or false?
  2. If true, is it pointlessly true or actually a useful way to think of things?
  3. If true and useful, has someone else already come up with this and explained it better than I did?