My first time there:\r
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4 out of 19 women canceled, so there was some gender imbalance and downtime. Each date was only 3 minutes, and it was too damn loud to have a good conversation. All but 3 of the women were ugly. If one picked a random cross-section of women in Santa Monica they would be better-looking than this, but there appears to be a problem of adverse selection, which is to be expected given the total lack of any pre-screening of the participants.\r
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According to the organizers, this always sells out for women months in advance, but men can still sign up until the last minute. My freakonomics-ish theory as to why that happens is that they don't stagger the age ranges. On average, women tend to prefer older men and men tend to prefer younger women. On average, a 30 year old man is more sought after than a 30 year old woman. So if the signups are ages 25-35 on both sides, then women have more of an incentive to sign up than men. They could fix the gender imbalance by staggering the age ranges to be like women 20-30, men 25-35.
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