Poor choice of strategy.

The other day I was tired so I decided to play couch potato and flip the channels on the TV. I got to the season premiere of a show we’ve got here. They place six guys and six girls in a house and the couple that comes out of it with "true love" gets to win a house, furniture and money.

On the season’s premiere the girls gets to pick the guys that are going to be allowed in the house. There is about 12 guys and only 6 will be chosen. But this year they introduced a twist. In the previous season, I’ve been told by a girl friend of mine who watch the show, that the guys presented themselves one after the other and all the girls decided together if they want to keep the guy or not. This year, once a girl decided to keep a guy, she then lost her "vote" to keep any further guys. She then had to rely on the remaining girls’ choice for further candidates. Each girl had to choose one guy and by doing so, loosing their right to choose for now on.

So the first guy comes along, presents himself and then while the girls were deliberating, they passed a little clip of the guy before he met the girls. The guy said "I want to be the first to pass because in the previous seasons the first was always selected". When the guy came back on the stage to get the girls’ result, what I suspected happened.
The girls decided to let go of him and not to choose him.

I knew it! This guy made a very bad choice of strategy. What he did is to ignore the state of the environment. The rules had changed and he played his strategy by the rules of last season… and lost.

See. Since the girls will loose their right of choice as soon as they choose to keep a guy, then they won’t want to waste their right on the first candidate. There is still plenty of men to come therefore the cost of letting go of the first one is minimum for the girls. The guys should have fought to pass somewhere when around 2/3 of the guys were passed. Because by then the girls’ choices would become scarce and would practically take anything that comes that fits their lowest standard, based on their fright of the next candidate being worst than the present one. Know what I mean?
So unless you are a drop dead Calvin Klein model, don’t pass first on those condition.

This set up is the same thing as in life. And several studies had been made on this. See. When women are young, they are picky. They play difficult. But as time past, when they see all their friends getting married and getting kids, while the only thing they can rely on is… they carrier. Then they get less picky. Their clock is ticking and the studies shows that as more the time past, the lower the standards gets.

So you want to get a gorgeous woman on your arm? Look at those single 30 to 40 years old women. There is less competition in that niche and women are more willing to bend their... rules of choice.

To finish with the morale of the story: When playing a game. Any games. A game of love on TV or the game of life. Make sure you understand on which rules you are playing. And to get an advantage over your opponents, understand the others’ responses and behaviour under those rules. By not understanding the rules of his game, our first guy got dismissed and lost.