'Love,” sings Amy Winehouse, “is a losing game.” Neil Strauss - author of the absurdly popular pick-up bible, The Game - begs to differ. In fact, given five minutes to work his magic with Winehouse, he would prove his point by taking her phone number. Don’t believe him? Ask Britney Spears or Pamela Anderson, both of whom yielded their digits to this unremarkable looking Los Angeles writer.

Strauss’s status as one of the world’s greatest pickup artists (or PUA) is a recent one. The Game, published in 2005, recounts his entry into a secretive group of PUAs called the “seduction community”. While among these men, Strauss, who is 5ft 6in tall and bald, learnt techniques and counter-intuitive wisdom that would allow him, in a matter of months, to develop from an unattractive social klutz to the community’s most successful member.

Before he began his life as a pickup artist, Strauss, now 38, had made a success in his profession - he was a celebrity ghostwriter and is still a contributing editor to Rolling Stone magazine - but he could never translate a sexy job into sex. He could meet girls and make a connection, but something always went wrong between first encounter and first date. “I had bad droughts of like two years,” he tells me. “I mean, even the Sahara gets some rain every year, right?”

Two years after his conversion from geek to stud - and, more significantly, after his book hit the top of the bestseller lists - Strauss has written a follow-up: The Rules of the Game. The book falls into two parts. The first is a month-long DIY programme for men seeking to learn what Strauss learnt, involving practical exercises, self-awareness psychobabble and insight into what the author deems to be the “illogical” thought processes of women on a night out.

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The second is a diary, detailing some of the darker moments of the author’s journey, including one troubling physical encounter with a sexagenarian neighbour. In this journal, Strauss seeks to reconcile the perceived male tendency towards sexual incontinence with the female urge to settle down - or, as he charmingly puts it: “What do you do after the orgasm?”

Are any feminists still reading? The Game is not, as one might imagine, prohibitively concerned with enlightened sexual politics. What it offers is a complicated way to satisfy base urges. But what happened to genuine chemistry? Isn’t there something seedy about seduction as an Olympic event? “Oh, it’s weird, I know,” says Strauss. “And it’s very easy to parody. But let me tell you something - when you have a beautiful, intelligent woman in your bed who just adores you, and you’ve just made love, you thank God for this stuff.”

So what’s the secret to “this stuff” - or “sarging” to give it its scientific name? Much of the art of seduction that Strauss teaches seems to come down to being confident. Strauss thinks I oversimplify.

“Everyone says that - just be confident,” he says. “But there’s a problem with that. Before I wrote the first book, when I was terrible with women, people used to say to me, ‘Just be confident’. But you might as well say, ‘Be Irish’. You’ve got to live in Ireland for a good while to become Irish and you’ve got to have had some success with women to be confident. The endpoint is not just to be confident, but to be competent.”

Tales of Strauss’s competence have inspired tens of thousands who bought his book and who now subscribe to his website. Take his “sarging” of Spears. In the middle of an otherwise unremarkable interview, Strauss threw in his “hook”. He told her that she threw her eyes down and to the left, which made her a “kinesthetic person” - a person who, he explained, “lives in their feelings”. Immediately he had broken the ice and, he says, “demonstrated higher value” - the reason why he stands out from the crowd.

He then went through a series of pseudo-psychological tricks with her: guessing the initials of a friend who was on her mind and accurately predicting a single-digit number she had written down. Spears was intrigued and, as Strauss explains, that’s always a good start. After the interview she handed over her phone number.

The methodology sounds simple but, as The Rules of the Game explains, there are many ways to skin a cat. And, when it comes to dating, says Strauss, logic will get you only so far. Indeed, he ran an experiment where he sent out two equally attractive men to try their luck on a night out. One was dressed as James Bond, the other in outrageously camp regalia. Bond finished a distant second. Why?

“The lesson here is - everything you think you know is wrong,” says Strauss. “But when you think about it, it makes sense. The James Bond guy is too cool for school. But the outrageous camp guy is a conduit for other people to have fun. Everyone’s going out to have fun so if you’re the guy that makes that happen, people are going to want you to stick around.”

Which explains Russell Brand. Clearly, opinions will differ on whether a night out with an averagely talented Keith Richards parody constitutes fun, but the moral of the story stands. In fact, Strauss and Brand have become friends because “we both recognise a fellow master”. Indeed, when Strauss had dinner with Brand and Courtney Love in London, he found that Brand, without having read his book, was employing many of the tactics found in The Game.

“He does just fine,” says Strauss. “The lifestyle he embodies - that is attractive to women. I don’t think his over-the-top femininity is a ruse to attract women, but he does exaggerate parts of his personality and that makes him interesting. And because most guys won’t do that, it just leaves more women for Russell Brand.”

Strauss did not write his book to assist celebrity satyrs. He did it for men like him - the “average frustrated chumps”. But the profile of the chumps he meets at book signings is changing. “At first it was more nerdy guys, the guys you might expect to have some problems with dating,” he recalls. “But then these football players and jocks started turning up and telling me how this book had changed their lives. And I’m like: I wrote this book so I could compete with guys like you. Now everybody’s level has been raised, damn it.”

Strauss has now written as much about dating as he cares to. His next book will be based far away from the world of the PUAs. And, he says, he has left behind his freewheeling single life and started dating one person. Has he found the answer to the question he posed himself: can one man - especially a man who believes he can sleep with almost any woman in the world - confine himself to one person for the rest of his life?

“Yeah, you can,” he says. “The secret is to make it a project. Guys are so project oriented. So, just as when I was in the seduction community I read every book I could about women and practised the techniques, I’ve got to treat this one relationship in the same way.”

However, Strauss is The Game. Finding a woman who trusts him not to lurch back into his “sarging” ways has proved a challenge - one he thinks he has now cracked. “My girlfriend now doesn’t give me any s*** about [The Game],” he says.

“She trusts me. So the lesson I learnt is this: if you’re a woman, date a guy you trust. And, if you don’t trust any guys, maybe it’s not their fault, it’s yours.” With advice like that, is it any wonder he’s such a hit with the ladies?

Improve your game:

- Make yourself seem unavailable

- Be a peacock - wear something flashy

- Send out a ‘neg’ - a negative remark will pique her interest

- Make time your ally - have somewhere else to be

- Don’t sink to their level - always stand tall around women

- If you don't have the patience for a whole book, the internet offers many sites with tips on the art of love, click here for some of our favourite chat-up lines