If, by "it's all true," you mean - if you try the same dumb thing on 6-10 women over the course of three bars in one night, you might be successful with one, I'm very sad about your little faith in the entire female population.
If I as a woman did the reverse - approached groups of men throughout the course of a night and tried the same type of "canned opener" or "pickup artist" moves - how quickly do you think I'd lose every single bit of respect in the male gender? Probably faster than you lost yours.
If you try it ten times and works only once that means you've messed up nine times: if you do it right, it works.
I understand your disbelief: I didn't believe it myself before trying it first hand. I know very well that going out alone hitting on strangers requires a lot of motivation but, if you ever feel like that, I can only recommend the experience. After that you will judge by yourself.
If you want to consider basic social skills to be "game" then, yes, everyone is receptive to it, but that's not what I mean. Some bits and pieces of "game" are general social skills that everyone would benefit to know (and 85% of people have already learned) but the worldview itself is a self-perpetuating mess.
The only genuine benefit of studying game is to develop social skills; it's just important to stop there before you start believing all that horseshit (most "evo-psych" is the 21st-century analogue of the four humors). There's no harm in reading it and being aware of the ideas, but letting this culture of runaway hypersexuality poison your view of human nature is a bad idea.
Good: developing basic social skills, making friends, and developing the confidence to pursue women you like.
Bad: Tailoring your personality to the lowest-common-denominator type of person who seeks sex in a bar or nightclub. If you let that filth into your mind, the enemy has won.
It's really as you said, social skills and no more: it's just about trial and error - knowing a lot of different situations and mindsets and learning how to 'work' with them.
I don't really know about all the esoteric stuff that these guys often talk about: I think they've been created so that someone can make a living out of it. But if they give the guys that are buying enough confidence to actually give it a try I guess it's okay.
Oh, do tell? What part of the brain? Please refer to the relevant studies.
What, and wow-slutty-behavior receptors aren't deeply and unavoidably bound into male brains?
I took random lines from the text verbatim and added some minor flourish to introduce it and claimed to have an "intuition" on them based on their voice or their profile.
Of ca. 30 women, only one called me out on it (a registered mental health nurse...), and I got a steady stream of "OMG!" and "how did you know that about me?!?" and "wow, it's so accurate!", and demands I'd tell them more. Some even started asking sexual questions after exchanging a couple of messages with more bland statements from the Forer experiment for no particular reason.
It's downright scary how low the barrier is.
Then again, I should've been prepared for it, as 15 years or so I was seriously discussing with a friend whether to write a chat bot to pick up women after we observed you could get numbers from a reasonably high percentage (we're talking 20%-30%, though I'm sure that must've dropped by now that people are more used to being lied to online) by quite strictly following a very simple script and not deviating from it with next to no adaptation based on context.
If you look at women as people you stop being surprised by these things (like that story I saw on reddit a few months ago about a research on "why women have sex"). I find it sad how sexist the whole pick-up scene is in this smug superiority they seem to teach people to approach the whole business.
Simpler tricks (e.g., a pushup bra) do work on men. But since no one denies that men are superficial and like big boobs, revealing this fact doesn't make anyone angry.
I think we hate the dirty tricks men pull to get laid the same reason we hate the dirty tricks women pull to get love-struck men hanging on to them: in some sense we have an easy time feeling but a hard time defining, it's breaking the rules of the game. Faking confidence, lying, telling stupid stories, using parlor tricks, &c. to pick up girls is breaking all kinds of social rules, but modern society is ill-equipped to stop them. In the book "The Game", Mystery states explicitly that taking advantage of the modern society/social rules impedance mismatch is what he does (though not in those words).
I think that the really important things are to grasp the concept, learn to use the feedback that you receive from them effectively and (most importantly) get over the fear of rejection that goes with the approach. Once you lose the fear everything becomes easy.
Ones I haven't read but have read much by the author that's good Bang, by RooshV
Just haven't read, Mystery Method, Magic Bullets
Uber misogynistic blogposts: Roissy in Dc Very misogynistic blog: Rooshv Sort of clinical blog : The Man Who Is Thursday
reddit.com/r/seduction is okay too
Ones I haven't read but have read much by the author that's good Bang, by RooshV
Just haven't read, Mystery Method, Magic Bullets
Uber misogynistic blogposts: Roissy in Dc Very misogynistic blog: Rooshv Sort of clinical blog : The Man Who Is Thursday
reddit.com/r/seduction is okay too
Especially don't take The Game as a manual. Much of what it describes is perhaps the worst aspects of "old style" game, full of manipulation and scripted material. A lot of newer stuff is far more palatable for most people, and much more "human".
Check out fastseduction.com or rsdnation.com - both are huge free resources.
fastseduction.com has archives of most of the posts referenced in The Game, as well as assorted guides and a step by step guide with references to reading material etc. for people who are new.
I'm 26 and have had a pretty solid dating life, but I've never dated an American white woman.
It takes a lot of time to meet good women, though. You have to be extroverted and make a lot of friends, who will introduce you to their friends. Don't expect results for at least a year. Even in Manhattan, I know some beautiful 22+ women who've never had a one-night stand.
Also, some advice: take a 3-to-6-month hard-line break from dating. You need to purge yourself of the misogyny that combat dating creates. I took a total break after I found myself, to my horror, behaving like an asshole to perfectly nice women. After that shock, I stopped dating entirely for 3 months, and met my current girlfriend after that.
Unfortunately that leaves you with pretty much nobody.
If you'd constrained it to, say, those who will agree to sex the same night, the numbers would look different, or to the ones who'd explicitly agree to something they know would end up as a one night stand.
But even then, most likely most of the girls you believe to be "classy" and/or "innocent" have at one time or another fallen for game, whether natural or learned - though they may not admit to it. Girls lie through their teeth about these things if put in situations where they're worried about being labeled.
And if you think game these days is constrained to "a few canned lines and techniques", you have no idea.