One of the best parts of the MS/churning community is how friendly and interesting the vast majority of the people participating in it are. Outside of a couple of bad apples, it’s one of the least toxic online communities I’ve personally ever been a part of. For a side hustle that is pretty lucrative and closely guarded, we can all come together over shared success and wins. 

In the overall churnosphere, there’s much more than just the individuals playing the game – a whole cottage industry has sprung up offering tools, platforms, arbitrage and more. From relatively high profile tools like seats.aero and Cardpointers that have widespread adoption to more niche platforms for navigating MS possibilities, there’s a whole little churning economy going on.

In many cases, these businesses are built by members of the community themselves. They first got into churning/MS, and then used their knowledge to build tools that solved real problems in the game. 

I could be wrong, but I doubt any of them are fat FIREing from development of these tools – just compensation for the time spent to build the tool. I’m glad to support people like Teddy and Ian that are helping the community improve their CPH.

There’s other businesses and players out there catering to MSers as well, but it’s a bit less “I’m developing this tool to solve a MS problem” and a little more “we’re going to piggy back on what you’re doing and take a cut”.

These other players are a necessary part of the ecosystem, and I’m glad that (some of) them are here. But lately, I can’t help but feel there’s a perception among the community that we’re dealing with friends when working with these parties, which is false – they are a business, and you are their customer. 

These other businesses earn from your spend, your targets, your points, your credits, etc. etc. They have a vested interest in you going harder and finding new avenues (and in one particular notorious platform’s case, blasting those new avenues to their entire customer base).

Again, (most) of them provide a necessary service and are an important part of the ecosystem. But we should all be cognizant of the fact that they are not our friends, they are a business, and we are the customers. 

They are not trying to help you streamline your time spent in wholesale stores or award searches – they are small and medium businesses trying to squeeze every last drop of margin from a transaction or sale. It’s awesome that MSers have options for earning/spending/liquidating at better rates, but these services are only being offered because they’re making money too. 

Ultimately, even the most seemingly MS friendly of businesses can end up getting you into unwanted territory. A returned payment from Amex is often a death sentence, and there’s no amount of cat pictures that can bail you out when that happens. 

And it’s not only on the MS side of things – there’s a graveyard full of frequent flyer accounts that are now banned after assurance from your third party “friend” that there wasn’t any risk in doing things a certain way. 

Having access to this economy is a win-win, but make sure you’re looking out for yourself in all of these negotiations. 

Good luck out there in the marketplace friends, and hope your year is off to a good start.

Баяр хүргэе!

Since the beginning of the hobby, there was generally a natural progression to move from churner to shrimp to dolphin to whale using whatever was the most popular platform of the time. Whether it was back in the day on Flyertalk, /r/churning, or deep down in comment threads on Doctor of Credit, you gradually picked up the context of what things were by committing to learning about it. 

This was a tedious process, and it certainly weeded out people that didn’t want to put in the legwork of better understanding the game. But it wasn’t that serious – I remember getting downvoted to oblivion on reddit many moons ago when I asked if the annual fee on a Southwest card counted towards Companion Pass, and I’m still here.

Things have changed a lot since then – /r/churning is a ghost town compared to its heyday, and Elliott Management has ensured that Southwest went from a program with extreme usefulness to yet another bad domestic airline. 

When the AApocalypse and nutritional supplement implosions happened, there was a natural push to move things out of the publicly indexable eye and safely out of a crawler searching things like “credit card offers for my houseplants”.

Nowadays, you can find the churning and MS chatter taking place in groups across every platform you can think of – from giant Facebook groups to tiny Whatsapp and Telegram chats. 

Much like Flyertalk and /r/churning, the ratio of legitimate discussion to the same question over and over varies day to day and group by group. For example, the major award travel Facebook groups are probably not a great place for even a beginner, because there’s so much static from easily searchable questions obscuring the helpful info. 

However, there are other places that are more helpful for scaling up. Private groups spun up in two forms – small probe groups of people that already knew each other, and paid groups from prominent creators who offered more exclusive content and chats. 

Much like their predecessors, there was an expectation of Googling easily answerable questions and contributing equally to the community. Speaking to my journey, I would occasionally post a negative data point and get a politely worded answer of “how did you possibly think that would work?”

Regardless of what era of the hobby and flavor of learning platform you had, you probably made a lot of mistakes along the way. Those missteps are invaluable on your journey from shrimp to dolphin to whale. It’s much better to learn about concepts like kiting when you’re moving four figures instead of six, and it’s much better to get shutdown by a very sensitive issuer early on than an important one later. 

Perhaps most importantly of all, making the mistake of hesitating on a play or signing up for a new debit is something you can only learn in time. Even ten years in, I was kicking myself this morning for the fact that some of my loops I can only run in one player mode due to procrastination years ago. 

However, over the last few years (and especially in the era of a plump man’s logistics company) there are people who have decided to ignore the best interest of the community, opting to essentially sell the trade secrets to anyone willing to pay for a Substack subscription with zero vetting. 

It’s an extremely shortsighted choice and is directly contributing to the war on happiness, but hey, this is America, who is going to tell them no? 

For me, the biggest concern is on the beginners they’re bringing in with unrealistic promises.

The value proposition is very different compared to some of the OG private groups associated with mainstay churning/MS content and feels much more like the kind of direct response marketing you’d see in the classifieds of tabloid rag promising riches while working from home.

Pictured: Whop grifters promising things you could learn yourself for the low, low price of $697

vs.

The Ron Swanson-esque value prop for Vinh over at Miles Per Day

Putting aside the obvious fact that guaranteeing that a certain easy MS method will stay alive and contribute to that $10k goal in 2026 is asking for trouble, some random kid on Whop should not be jumping straight into full MS without learning about the basics of the hobby first. That’s how people end up buying five figures on closed-loop gift cards they have zero use for.  

I think messaging things like “earn $20k/yr in credit card points when you sign up” is so irresponsible when you aren’t ensuring that the people signing up have the foundation necessary to navigate the inevitable troubles that occur when MSing. But at the same time, that headline sells a hell of a lot better than the realistic copy that some of the legacy communities use.

Even in my own experience, I’ve had a couple of friends who I helped get deep quickly. Even with monitoring, some of them were shutdown for doing reckless things because they didn’t know they were reckless. And since I had learned not to do said thing 8 years ago, I didn’t think to mention it. 

Anyway, unlike the people who parlayed getting into a private group into essentially grifting that info elsewhere, I’ve always believed there’s more money to be made building a community of like minded people. Most of us are clear-eyed about the fact that you had some level of chance interaction to get to where you are now, outside of the oldest of heads. 

I’ll continue to do my best helping point people that are ready for it in the right direction, while also respecting that spoonfeeding isn’t doing anyone any favors, and that’s what I’d suggest to you too. 

Coming soon: EARN $5K A DAY WITH CHASING CETACEANS LOOP PLAYBOOK /s (jk) and whatever else I need to say to make this clearly tongue in cheek.

Hope your new year is off to a great start friends!

Terviseks!

Pictured: an ice cold Ožujsko in Dubrovnik, circa 2018

Editor’s note: This post is very long and somewhat personal/vulnerable (my probe group may even go so far as to call it…sensitive?) and while it relates to MS and churning plenty, it isn’t about a specific play. If you liked my post on finding purpose in travel, you’ll probably enjoy it. If you didn’t, feel free to skip, no worries, I’m fully back on topic next week! And butterboy, if you’re reading this, it’s too long, it’s not too late to turn back! 

For me, the start of a new year always means pensive reflection on the past year. Many of my favorite moments and biggest accomplishments of 2025 were directly driven by churning and MS, and it got me thinking about what the hobby means to me. 

In a way, it’s a continuation of this post. I hope you enjoy this musing to start the year. 

If I had to describe myself in black and white, I’d be a card-carrying type B personality. Nobody ever says that, of course, because talking about your personality type is for type A people. 

But nobody’s personality is that simple (and interestingly, the whole type A/B thing was funded by Big Tobacco in an attempt to divert attention from smoking being a cause of heart disease). 

Outside of my type B traits, I have two common hallmarks of type A people – the first is lifelong chronic anxiety, and the second is a need to find purpose in achieving a measurable result.

I can’t do much about the first one (although hey, therapy gave me the self-awareness to arrive at this thesis, so that’s good?), but I now recognize how important the second one is to me. 

In a lot of my adult life, I’ve struggled with listlessness as it related to having something that I was both passionate about and could measure progress and success in. When I was trying to figure out how to fix it, I thought back to being a kid and how I didn’t struggle with it, even though I did with anxiety.

It was pretty clear – I had two things I found a lot of purpose in that were easily measurable. The first was school, and the second was the sport I competed in from ages 10-18. 

I don’t know if I’d call myself smart, but I’m lucky that back then I had a somewhat eidetic memory that made things like standardized tests come naturally. But while I was acing tests, I was also doing things like tying my shoes together and proceeding to bust my ass falling down stairs, so you can decide for yourself if I’m smart. 

In the sport that I played, it was more of the opposite. I had little natural talent for it (and had a form defect that often got me disqualified, even though it made me worse), but I was extremely passionate about it and gave 100% at all times. 

I was one of those psycho kids that had College Board books listing colleges by 12, and I had a clear idea of the times I needed to achieve in my sport by memorizing what the cutoff pages looked like. 

I ended up achieving some of the things I dreamed of as a kid – I got into some prestigious schools, performed well at my sport (with diminishing returns), and declared to compete D1 in college. 

But along the way, I’d lost some of the competitive fire for the sport. My lack of natural talent caught up in the second half of high school, because everybody was working hard at that level in a way that not everybody was at 12 years old. 

It was crushing to watch people pass me while knowing I was still giving it my all (although with the gift of more mature hindsight, I was also coming of age and priorities shifted towards skipping practice every once in awhile for football games, dating, concerts etc.) 

In the end, I never competed in college, and I didn’t graduate from that prestigious school I initially attended. I ended up graduating from a mid-tier state school, and found some level of purpose in working hard for good grades in the hopes of getting a great job out of college, parlaying that into an MBA admission, and then getting some type of FAANG job afterwards.

I was lucky to find a fairly ideal job within a few months with great coworkers, many of whom I am still friends with years later. Having a job I was driven at made it easy to find purpose, but the measuring stick was a bit of an issue. Some positions can be quantified easily, but mine wasn’t one of them. 

The only real way for me to evaluate myself on working towards a goal was via salary or promotion – two things that didn’t come around often, regardless of how much time I spent at the office and the worry and anxiety I devoted to it at home. 

After a few years of that and experiencing unbridled corporate toxicity outside of my department, my views on work/life balance shifted quite a bit, and I stopped measuring myself on whether I got promoted every year. Any interest I had in getting an MBA and FAANG job fizzled out with it. However, I didn’t replace that old quantifiable goal with anything, and that was when the feeling of listlessness really exploded.

By this point in time, I was churning at a decent level. I hadn’t tried business class or been to the Maldives or anything like that, but I have some really fond memories of the first trips I took fueled by churning. My P2 and I had road tripped through Iceland and Croatia, attended Sziget in Budapest, fished the crystal clear flats of Belize and more. 

As much as I loved having the ability to take trips like that, it still wasn’t scratching my itch to quantify progress that I was making on something I was passionate about. 

Of course, there is a way to quantify travel, but I’d recommend against trying to measure success solely by country counting. While adding a new country to your list is a great feeling, focusing exclusively on it leads to racing through trips without enjoying the experience. I once met a couple on the Flixbus from Budapest to Prague that counted a 15 mins detour on the bus into Bosnia & Herzegovina as B&H being crossed off their list, no need to visit Mostar or Sarajevo anymore. They didn’t even have a ćevapi or burek!

Anyway, like many of us during the pandemic, I was bored, anxious, and depressed. I decided to dig much deeper into churning, and quickly realized my perception that living in NYC precluded me from MSing was incredibly false.

While it took a few years to get really deep, I was measuring myself on learning a little bit more each day and adding new tools, platforms and loops into my MS toolbelt. Once I was starting to earn significant cashback and more miles and points than I could hope to use in 10 years, I realized I was scratching the itch to quantify my efforts in a way that I hadn’t been able to do since I was in high school.

While you have to play within the frameworks of the bank, MS is one of the very few things in life where you have the agency to control how much you earn while also being infinitely more scalable than the average /r/beermoney activity. 

You aren’t relying on an official, admissions board, or HR department to say that you deserve this accomplishment. If you want to go out and make $5,000 today, you have the ability to (although much like school or sports, legwork is required). 

One thing I find really interesting is how people found churning, and why they stick around. We have diverse reasoning for ending up here and still being at it. 

For me, it’s not FIRE or needing a bunch of award seats for a big family. I just enjoy playing a game where the relationship between effort and reward is pretty damn close to 1:1. 

Granted, I spend about 5% of my hobby time probing things and actually running loops with the remaining 95% dedicated to bantering in Discord, but hey, I’m still a type B after all. 

Lastly, being heavy into MS made me realize that it’s possible to quantify and measure travel in a way that isn’t likely to make people not want to talk to you. Instead of counting countries, use MS as a way to cross truly crazy things off of your bucket list. It’s a personal accomplishment that has meaning to you, your friends and family will love to hear about, and isn’t something you need to compete on. 

Want to sit in the Paddock Club for a Formula 1 race? No big deal – just MS the hell out of your Amex Hilton. Want to see the total eclipse in Egypt? Any expensive arrangements you need to make aren’t bad when you aren’t paying for flights or hotels. Have an esoteric hobby that holds meetups on another continent? No problemo. 

Personally, I spent close to seven figures of AA miles on 2026 World Cup tickets so that P2 and I can go with our soccer-rabid friends and make lifelong memories. Was that an irresponsible choice given we fly oneworld way more often than other alliances and I am likely to lose my source of easy generation in 2026? Probably. But looking back fondly on something like attending a hometown World Cup is exactly why we play this game, and scratching that itch is truly addicting. 

As my P3 (my mom, lmao) likes to note, it’s exciting to see me have something that I’m so passionate about. And at least for me, it provides necessary dopamine that I wasn’t able to find in the past.

One of my resolutions this year is to streamline my time spent in the spirit of my friend mforch’s views of CPH. However, I’m sure I’ll end up spending some time in the weeds that could be better spent upskilling on something else or reading a book, but I can’t help myself. Just like some of you, I do it all for the love of the game. 

Hope you had a good start to your new year, and let’s collaborate on killing it in 2026. 

Ура!

Hey y’all, I hope you all had a good Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, or whatever other holidays you chose to observe during this festive time of year.

While we’re all resting this week and getting ready to start 2026 on a good note, I decided it was a nice time to play some more games, with a 2025 wrapped theme.

Like Halloween, there is a Wordle (and thanks to NYT devs, it’s now actually real Wordle instead of a knockoff), a Connections puzzle, and a mini crossword. This time, the Connections is a little easier, and the crossword is a little harder.

If you get stuck at any point, remember that both of these puzzles are strictly within the category of 2025 Year in Review.

Good luck on the puzzles, enjoy your New Year’s Eve, and I’ll be back to more regular posting on Thursday.

Εβίβα!

• Wordle
• Connections
• Mini Crossword

We’re halfway through December, which means it’s officially that time of year in which every possible app, website, and community jumps on the “your year wrapped trend” that hasn’t really even been that interesting since Spotify first started it in 2015. 

I’ll admit that I used to share mine thinking that people cared (they didn’t), but hey, Australian reggae and metalcore is an interesting mix of top genres, right?

Anyway, this time of year is a good time for all of us (especially the most accomplished of us) to heed the famous words of renowned scribe Lil Wayne. And I’m not being tongue in cheek – his tidal wave of nonstop releases from 2006-2008 were about as impressive as it gets, although the eponymous line is from his post-peak career in 2011. 

Years in review are often a chance to brag and showboat a little bit – you listened to this much music, stayed in this many hotels, flew on this many flights. It’s fun to reminisce on both your adventures and the cool things that your friends and family did. 

And while that’s totally fine, I think you’ll find that the folks with the truly interesting exploits aren’t sharing the details of it all over their Instagram story. In fact, they probably aren’t even talking about it at all. 

Case in point – everybody’s favorite subreddit currently has a year in review thread up for you to brag about earning and burning this year. 

First, a disclaimer that I am in no way saying that the accomplishments shared are not amazing, and there are some people doing some awesome things in that thread.

But at the same time, you’ll notice that there isn’t much discussion around any cashback, and if there is, it’s primarily bank bonuses. I don’t see this as a referendum on travel vs. cashback, because again, they are the exact same thing. But the reason that most people graduate to cashback is hitting an inflection point where earn wildly outpaces burn. 

On less public spaces somewhere in the intermediate to advanced realm, there is still plenty of chatter around scale and personal gain. But in my experience, the heaviest of hitters aren’t the ones screaming it from the rooftop (outside of very private chats). 

Once you’re close to growing into a full-size whale, there’s not much left to be gained from openly gloating about the details of hitting something. Clout matters less and less the higher up you get, and oversharing is less and less likely to impress. 

Anyway, take some time to compile and celebrate your wins. Chances are, even with everything going on, you did very well this year. But keeping the specifics of those wins primarily within your loved ones, your probe group, or both, is going to be more beneficial to everyone in the long run. 

Saħħa!

One of the most difficult things to comprehend even at an intermediate or advanced level is the full potential of value associated with certain plays. 

We’ve all been so conditioned to do the inane math of annual fee minus some arbitrary value of credits that Big Blog has beaten into us that reading between the lines and thinking a little bit more creatively can be tricky at times.

However, failure to think like this more often is putting a ceiling on your earning ability and is likely going to be a detriment heading into the new year. 

There’s not really a trick to shifting your mindset – it just comes with experience, some dead-play autopsies, and a whole lot of FOMO.

Since I like to do examples here, let’s do another vaguely-alluded-to autopsy. In 2024, a lot of cetaceans were enjoying a very simple loop. While not all of the pieces to do it were public, anyone who was paying to join a private group had all of the knowledge necessary to do it themselves.

However, even in these private groups, I saw countless people talk about how useless the involved card for the loop was. A lot of times, people asked why choose that card over the business card counterpart? The answer was right there in the marketing language on the card’s application page – it just wasn’t related to an elevated sign up bonus, or some new coupon book. 

Now there was a bit more nuance to it than just choosing the right card, but everything you needed to put 2 and 2 together wasn’t a closely guarded secret. You just had to think creatively, understand the tools and methods available to you, and possess the strong stomach needed to deal with moving that much money around all the time. 

Going forward, it’s likely going to require even more critical thinking. For example, any credit union card with an intriguing MS angle is going to get the DoC hug of death sooner rather than later. It’s just a natural consequence of the game having more players than ever. 

But there’s always going to be room for savvy MSers who are willing to do some probing and spend time networking with like-minded people to profit and travel well. 

It’s always wise to consider others’ opinions on things, while understanding that it’s ultimately still up to you to analyze what the value of a play is. Just because something isn’t valuable at face value doesn’t mean it isn’t, and vice versa. But you won’t know until you try. 

Шәныҳәаз!