Pick-up artists are kind of like martial artists, in a sense. Except with way more bullshit and placebo built around it. 

In martial arts, you learn skills, you have to get into a certain state of mind, and you have to practice, but they're trying to prepare you for something with a billion variables that nothing short of experience will ever be able to properly prepare you for. All those highly specific fight-ending maneuvers you learn you will probably never get the opportunity to perform, and when you do, it probably won't end the way you predict, because f*#ping nothing will. They [i]do[/i] give you one thing that always helps your chances, though, and that's physical conditioning.

That's what pick-up artists are, basically, but, as I said, with all the potentially useful teachings stripped away for plain bull, among other, more destructive lessons. They give the less skeptical student the courage and willingness to ask the girl out, which is the most important aspect. They don't have chances if they never tried to begin with. Of course, it'll probably never work for someone *aherm* aesthetically disabled, but a guy with no eyes and only one of each limb just isn't boxer material, is he?

Invariably, there will be at least one woman in a million that would accept his proposal, (And the unfortunate boxer may be able to beat the crap out of one in a million guys, but I'm done with this entertaining analogy) but he has neither the time nor resources to meet literally a million women. That's what dating sites are for, the ability to ask one million women out at once.