Since the dawn of time, men have been trying to figure out how to get chicks into bed. In the Paleolithic era, assaulting a sexy hominid with a club and dragging her into your cave worked like a charm. But then evolution brought about pesky things like language, pants, and plenty of male competition, forcing guys to refine their tactics.

So what pickup gimmicks have men invented over the years? Carrying girls’ books home from school, asking them to the sock hop, lying; writing them love poems, buying them flowers, lying; fixing their flat tires, poking them on Facebook…lying. Yet nothing seems to be 100 percent foolproof. (Especially lying.)

Enter the modern pickup artist. Ever since the bestseller The Game depicted a bizarre but supposedly successful society of “PUAs” (pickup artists) a few years ago—one of whom now coaches dateless geeks via his own show on VH1—men have been following all their sketchy, seemingly counterintuitive advice to the letter. But the result is a population of misguided and increasingly desperate guys striking out more spectacularly than ever. So do any of these new classic pickup tips actually work, or are they all guaranteed to bomb? To help you sort through all the conflicting information, I asked 20 women to weigh in. Their breakdowns will help you get real game—and get laid.

Ploy No. 1: Give Her a “Neg”
The most famous tactic from The Game, a “neg” is a “seemingly accidental insult delivered to a beautiful woman to demonstrate a lack of interest in her.” An example: “Your hair is pretty. Are you a natural blonde?” The purported objective of a neg is to approach a hot girl who’s accustomed to getting compliments and nudge her self-confidence into the basement through subtle criticism—to the point where she’ll even concede to sleeping with you (or at least giving you her number) for validation. Charming!

Gamers, beware: Every woman I spoke to despises this trick. “If a guy gave me a backhanded compliment like that, I’d tell him to fuck off,” says Tori, a 28-year-old stylist. Alix, a 27-year-old bartender, described her firsthand experience with a neg. “A customer told me his favorite movie, and I said, ‘Oh, I love that one, too!’” she says. “Then this other guy who was waiting to order said, ‘That’s pretty lame. Don’t you have any opinions of your own?’ He thought he was flirting. I thought he was just being an asshole.”

Simple as it may seem, most women agree that genuine flattery (without the jibe at the end) is the quickest way into our shorts. Just skip the clichés and focus on the details. Jalisa, a 31-year-old real estate broker, was impressed recently when a guy commented on a feature that often goes unnoticed. “I was wearing a strapless top, and I caught his eyes drifting to my shoulders while we talked,” she says. “Final­ly he said, ‘I’m sorry for staring, but you’ve got such a beautiful collarbone.’ He reached out to touch it, sweeping my hair back while he did it, and my knees almost buckled. I knew that second I was sleeping with him that night.” Make us feel interesting and sexy and we’ll reward you. Tell us our pants are a little snug and you’re going home alone, Spanky.

Verdict: Except for emotionally crippled broken wings, women don’t respond well to being insulted.

Ploy No. 2: Have a Routine
PUAs are former outcasts who need crutches in social situations. That’s why they advocate approaching women with “prepared material”—a joke, a quiz, even a magic trick. Um…yeah. If we wanted to see magic, we’d be home watching reruns of Criss Angel Mindfreak, not sitting in a bar with friends, having a life. In fact, anything that feels that rehearsed is likely to flop. “I had a guy come up to me recently and say, ‘Pick a number between one and 10,’” says Zoe, a 28-year-old set designer. “I told him, ‘Zero—which represents the number of seconds more I’ll be playing this game,’ and I walked away.”

Telling a joke is just as risky. Most shtickfests are juvenile or just plain bad, and plenty walk the line of good taste. Humor can work, however—when it’s spontaneous. “I was at a crowded bar when a guy turned to me and said, ‘Who do I have to show my tits to to get a beer around here?’” says Lisa, a 31-year-old attorney. “I started laughing and said, ‘You show yours, I’ll show mine—we’ll see who gets served faster.’ The conversation was sexual right off the bat. I had my hands down his pants in the bar bathroom by the end of the night.”

Verdict: Maybe you can hold our attention by levitating for a second, David Blaine, but it doesn’t mean we want to screw.

Ploy No. 3: Disarm Your Competition
Attractive women are almost always being hit on by someone. An intimidated guy will get scared off by the rival and seek out a different object of affection. But followers of the Game see this as an opportunity to assert themselves. They call it AMOGing (the verb form of the acronym “alpha male of the group”) or outalphaing: “to remove a potential male competitor through physical, verbal, or psychological tactics.” Basically, that means pushing your way into their conversation and showing you’re smarter and funnier than the other guy.

Now, if the guy in question is the woman’s boyfriend, you could be in for a fight. But if you see a sexy girl being hit on by someone she’s clearly not interested in (her eyes are darting around the room; she’s maintaining a physical distance), step in. Jodie, a 28-year-old architect, had been cornered for 10 minutes with “a monotoned loser” when a stranger swooped in pretending to be her boyfriend. “He said, ‘Honey, what’d I tell you about not charming the pants off the whole bar while I was gone?’ I played right along by throwing my arms around him—and when we looked at each other we just spontaneously kissed. It was so hot that as the first guy slunk away I pulled my ‘boyfriend’ outside for a make-out session.”

Verdict: Every girl loves to have men fighting over her. And if you rescue her from some tool’s story about his high school’s math Olympics, you’ll be her hero.