Should You Use Tinder Top Picks?

Use the free one, and test the rest before you pay for it. Tinder's help center says every user gets a free Top Pick each day, so looking at it costs you nothing. Gold and Platinum subscribers are shown their full set of Top Picks, and whether that set is worth paying for depends on your results. Top Picks highlights the potential matches the app considers most swipe-worthy for you. It does not promise a match.

Top Picks is a short list that Tinder compiles for you. It highlights the people the app considers most swipe-worthy for you, so you see them in one place instead of waiting for them to come up in your main stream.

Subscribers open it from the Gold or Platinum flame icon on the Discovery screen. Their daily set refreshes every 24 hours with a whole new group of profiles. Gold and Platinum subscribers can also buy additional Picks, and they have 24 hours to view or swipe them before they disappear.

What it does not do is tell you whether a woman likes you. A Top Pick is Tinder's guess about taste, so the interest in her has to be yours.

If you are not a subscriber, you get a free Top Pick each day. It costs nothing, and it occasionally shows you a woman you might have scrolled past.

Check it when you open the app and treat it like any other card. Do not plan your day around it, and do not feel you are missing out because it is only one.

Paying for the full set is a different decision, and a dating coach's rule for it is useful. He treats most paid features as multipliers. They make your existing results bigger. That is great when your free account already gets matches, and pointless when it does not, because zero multiplied by anything is zero.

So before you pay, check that you get at least some matches for free. If you do, the full set is a fair thing to test. If you get almost none, the money will do more good elsewhere.

Use the free pick for two weeks and record what happens. How many of the cards did you like, how many liked you back, and how many turned into a conversation that went past the first message?

Then run the full set for a comparable stretch and keep the same record. My advice on paid features is to try one once, cheaply, and drop it if it makes no difference. A feature that looks useful is not the same as one that has produced dates.

Most men waste the feature by liking everything in it. The set arrives looking like a recommendation, so it feels rude to pass.

It is not rude, and it hurts you to like everyone. My point about the apps is that swiping right on everyone makes you look unselective, and an app that sees that has little reason to show you the women you actually want. Your swipes teach it your taste, including the ones on Top Picks.

Read each card properly. If you would be glad to match and you have something specific to say, like her. Otherwise pass.

Extra Picks come with a 24 hour clock, so they only make sense for a man who will go through them the same day. They also add more cards from the same source, so they cannot fix a weak first photo or an empty first message.

Photos matter more than any feature. coach points out that she judges you on your worst photo, so one weak shot can undo several good ones. Fixing that is free.

It is worth it when you are already matching, you have photos you trust, and you want a small, easy way to see a few more good cards each day. It is not worth it when you are matching almost nothing, because the cause is somewhere a feature cannot reach.

Open the free Top Pick once, read it as you would any other card, and decide in under a minute. Then go back to your regular swiping and your open conversations, which are where most of your dates will come from.

A feature that takes a minute a day is easy to keep up, and easy to judge. If you find yourself spending a long time on Top Picks and little on the women who have already matched with you, the balance has tipped the wrong way.

Yes for the free one, and maybe for the full set once you have measured it. Look at the Top Picks each day, judge each woman on her own, and keep your standards where they were.