Pictured: A whale with a very heavy wallet who is mildly annoyed, but not particularly concerned about potentially losing some easy money, one increment of $176 at a time

There’s not much that the churning and MS community loves more than a good data point. Up to date info on what works, what doesn’t, and what’s YMMV ensures that Flyertalk threads make it to 100 pages long fairly frequently. 

As a result of that appetite for an accurate, fresh data point, we tend to get tunnel vision when leaning on others’ experience to ensure that our play of the day is going to go off without a hitch.

To be clear, I’m not arguing against the importance of data points. What I am pushing back on is the endless debate over data points tied to plays that represent a small slice of the average churner’s overall P&L.

To illustrate with a timely example – there is going to be a lot of ink spilled over the churning story du jour, which is somehow less interesting than the Bilt refresh. At least Bilt is giving gamers a small window to make a lot of money. 

I am of course talking about the hootenany over the (maybe?) death of everyone’s favorite use of Amex incidental travel credits. First off, as MEAB already pointed out, we have no idea if this is really the end. 

This has happened in the past, and it’s well known that Amex occasionally needs to give the credit and MR machines a swift kick to keep them humming.

But honestly, nobody reading this should be overly concerned, even if it is dead. Just look at the math. 

Let’s say you are a shrimp that is still growing in the game, and you have 2 ABPs. You liquidated your credits and waited for reimbursement.

But you weren’t reimbursed – now what? You could just fly UA and consider it a small interest-free loan you gave them (the loan is fine; it’s the flying UA that’s the problem). 

You could also liquidate it as if nothing changed at all – $200 x 2 x ~0.88 = $352. Did you lose $48? Yeah, and that’s annoying. But that is just a cost of doing business, just like fat fingering a wager, forgetting to cancel a card within the rebate window, etc. This isn’t the first time something like this has happened, and it won’t be the last.

People will (correctly) say irieriley, this is a stupid argument – it’s not about the loss of $48, it’s the inability to recoup the $352 that is the problem here. 

This is true – I primarily mention the minor cost to liquidate to alleviate the fear of having money stuck in UA (totally valid, lol). But you already paid the annual fee, and the money wasn’t tangible until you used the credit and got the reimbursement. And after what happened with Hilton credits last year, this felt like a matter of if, not when.

But most of you don’t have 2. Let’s say that between you and your P2, you have 20. 

Multiply the previous figures by ten and you’re looking at a $480 realized hit if you fail to get reimbursed, or, more accurately, the inability to recoup $3,520.

Again, that sucks. But if you’re already paying $18k of annual fees to Amex, you’ve reached a level that this isn’t catastrophic, especially since you are still coming out way ahead post SUBs, ECs, etc. And all you need to do is find $300 of play a month to make up for lost profit. 

Of course, there are whales for whom the potential loss is much bigger – but no ragrets. The only reason that potential loss is so big is because you were already slamming it hard 🐋.

Lastly, if you don’t end up getting reimbursed, you do technically still have the credit. While none of us would prefer $200 of lounge passes, checked bags and onboard trail mix over $176 cash, I’ve personally found uses for them outside of credit in the past. While it’s no replacement for cash, they can be quite useful in niche situations.

And look, if it really is over, it’s frustrating, and I’m not pretending it’s not. But ultimately, it’s just one more step in the broader march of enshittification that is turning every premium card into an expensive prepaid coupon book. The issuers are making it very clear that this is the game plan going forward.

So, instead of spending time hand-wringing over whether reimbursements will post, channel that same energy into finding your next play. I guarantee the ROI is higher.

Meqem qaagiti!

One year ago today, the hammer that everyone but the most devoted Kool-Aid drinkers knew was coming finally fell on a wide swathe of churners. 

While shutdowns are always a part of the game and we must take them in stride, this wave was particularly notable. First, it wasn’t just whales that were caught up – people that were technically doing magnitudes less than the whales (but dolphins in a vacuum) caught the ban hammer as well. 

But more importantly, it felt like the opening salvo against the infinitely scalable couch MS that had proliferated in the community over the last few years. As we all know now, this is exactly what it was.

I think a lot of people let the fact that you’d start hearing the Scarface money counter synths playing in your head every time you logged into your MR account cloud the fact that what the whales (and some dolphins) were doing wasn’t sustainable. 

We talk quite a bit about volume and velocity to make sure the math maths on our plays. With enough of both, margin sometimes takes a back seat when doing the value equation. 

It’s one thing to go full hog on a low-margin, high-volume play if it has no other utility. But even the most avowed haters of this play (of which there are many) will admit it had additional use cases.

It ended up being a great example of one of the very few things I remember from taking 3 econ courses in college – the tragedy of the commons. 

Of course, nothing in life is black and white, and not all of the blame belongs with the whales. I’m generally an advocate for going hard, and everything was ok until it wasn’t. But I do think it was fairly easy to see this ending coming.

While scale created the pressure, it wasn’t the only accelerant. If whales were the volume related stress that caused this shutdown wave, the grifters I’m always railing against were the straws that broke the camel’s back. Selling the hard work of others to anyone with $40/mo with zero context of how to operate led to some really dicey situations for beginners. 

This is the epitome of the kind of play you shouldn’t be spoon fed – you need to learn, make mistakes and understand the level 100 (and level 200) concepts of churning and MS before starting. But because it was a simple way to blast spend, the course sellers were more than happy to give it to anyone. 

Now here on President’s Day in 2026, the game has changed quite a bit. The referral offers that made this so valuable are long gone. Finite caps have been placed on the most important categories. Hell, you can’t even use Amex at Costco. 

It’s more important than ever not to be a one trick pony, but I still believe in butterboy’s thesis that you need to find your France. I just don’t believe that this one should be anyone’s France. 

As my friend Andrew loves to remind me every time I act like /r/churning was the genesis, this hobby has been around since the advent of loyalty programs. Gamers are gonna game, regardless of the speed bumps along the way. 

It sucks to see good things die, but I get more optimistic with every day that new angles will last longer when so much casual interest died on this day a year ago. 

Sahil cholejil!

Pictured: My original pfp in every private churning group I joined back in the day. If you don’t know who this is, you’re missing out, both on the song reference of this post, and more importantly, an outlook on life we could all stand to learn from

I’ve received a lot of feedback in the wake of this whole “where do beginners belong in the hobby” conversation, and it made me a tad pensive. I wanted to dive a bit deeper.

First of all, I hope that my frustration at the situation isn’t coming across as vitriol towards beginners themselves, because that couldn’t be farther from the truth. 

We were all beginners once, and nobody is inherently more deserving of this knowledge just because they discovered /r/churning before someone else. Most of us old heads had a lucky chance encounter along the way to get to this point, and even though we made the most of the opportunity, luck still played a role.

Once you manage to make it into the unindexed world of private groups, there’s definitely an expectation of self-sufficiency and discretion. But before that happens, beginners are being bombarded by so many different sources of information.

Between affiliate spammers, classic digital nomad course seller archetypes, Instagram influencers, and even legitimate scammers, beginners are dealing with a lot of noise. Of course they’re getting bad advice, because the people selling them this hobby are incentivized to do so. 

There’s a lot of money to be made playing the game, but there’s even more money to be made influencing others. And it’s understandably easy to convince novices to follow a certain path. They see overwater bungalows and Etihad Apartments and justifiably want a piece – how could you not? 

But aspirational redemptions (and aspirational profits) require a thoughtful plan, and that’s usually a tiny footnote at the end of the document, after 30 different referral links, give or take.

I do want to give a nod to the small population of mainstream content creators that I think safely straddle the line between earning a living and providing useful info to someone that is brand new to churning without blowing plays up. I always try to point people towards sources like Chris at All the Hacks or Frequent Miler for a true starting point.

Anyways, I’m always a little flattered when people that are newer find their way here, because I’ve made zero effort to publicize the blog outside of the two private groups I got my start in. Not because I’m trying to keep it a secret (it’s public, after all), but because I had doubts about how much utility it would honestly provide to newer people (or anyone, quite frankly). 

I like to think that finding your way here, MEAB or some other contrarian source of MS news is an indication that you may have the right mindset to succeed. Not because we’re great writers (Matt is, I’m not), but because we aren’t beholden to issuers that require you to treat every new card refresh like the greatest thing since sliced bread. You could really tell who had editorial freedom during the Bilt fiasco, that is for sure.  

All of this is to say that my ire (and the ire of the vast majority of the veterans) isn’t directed at new people who have zero context about why some of these things are so sensitive. It’s not your fault you want to fly premium cabins and earn money – who doesn’t? 

The unwise choices that are killing things are being made by the short-sighted people in the community who choose to shine a giant spotlight on things and offer access to it without the necessary learning and context you traditionally would have in the past. 

The natural backlash in the community has led to this awkward state in which groups are all closed off, but so much of the conversation is happening in DMs instead of the channels that were once full of lively banter. As so many quality sources of information have tightened up access, the only shops left in town for beginners to “level up” are the aforementioned grifters. 

While I fully understand the frustration of beginners, there is a flip side to discuss as well that I’ve alluded to. I do think there is a tendency for beginner MSers to feel derision towards veterans when a play dies. There’s some semblance of “you got yours, why should I care?”. 

The first hole in this logic is the obvious fact that the play died for you too. If veterans are upset about something dying, it means you should be angry about it too. Losing angles hurts at every level – but it hurts more the higher you get, regardless of how well you’ve already done.

As you’ve probably gathered at this point, incremental gains for whales and dolphins aren’t being used to fly EK F for the 14th time in a year. It’s going towards very tangible, real things – house down payments, college tuition for children, medical bills, etc. 

I don’t need to get into oversharing territory with my own reason for grinding, outside of saying that my goal is giving a loved one a much-needed break. 

There’s no right or wrong answer to this complicated problem, but this is my perspective. I worked my ass off to get to where I’m at in this hobby, but there were some elements of “right place, right time” to get me to where I am. I try my best to remember that when I’m talking to others.

“And in your belly you hold the treasures few have ever seen

Most of ’em dream, most of ’em dream”

Ẹ kú àṣeyọrí!

If you don’t know the eponymous song, I recommend listening to the album that is my personal definition of “all killer no filler”, provided you like a healthy dose of brass section)

This has been a difficult week for the churning community, and that pent up frustration is boiling over into arguments all over the place. 

It feels like it’s time for one last thought on the whole “sharing vs. gatekeeping” debate that’s raging across every single Discord, Slack, Telegram and WhatsApp MS chat right now before I return to the super serious things I talk about like MySpace surveys.

It’s easily the most divisive topic in the entire hobby, for good reason. And when things are divisive, we tend to think in black and white extremes that don’t reflect the reality we’re operating in.

For veterans, it feels like one more beginner is the straw that breaks the camel’s back, and the vault needs to be permanently closed.

And for those beginners, the perception is that a group of elitists are purposely making it impossible to level up, hoarding all of the gold (figuratively and literally) like Smaug. 

Neither of these things are true, but neither one is completely false either. At the same time, binary thinking like this is doing nothing but increasing polarization and ignoring the vast spectrum in the middle between those two poles.

I’m in an interesting spot because I spend a lot of time talking to people on both ends because of the blog. I try my best to understand both sides, because I’ve been in both spots. I was once a very green beginner, and I’m now a grumpy veteran that is beyond sick of watching things die. 

There isn’t one right answer to this dilemma – hell, there isn’t even one right answer about sharing a single unit of knowledge. The spectrum of what is ok to share and where is so wide that the argument will never end.

I like to think my viewpoint can be read between the lines now, but it boils down to this:

New people joining the game isn’t automatically a bad thing. Increased pressure on targets (and customer service lines) unequivocally is a bad thing. 

New players that are willing to put in the work to scale up deserve a chance to move up the food chain, provided they’re doing it in a sustainable way.

On the flip side, the veterans are 100% correct that the market is beyond saturated. Even looking beyond previously easy things like points liquidation or precious metals spend – have you tried to book a J flight to Japan, the Maldives or some other churner favorite lately? It’s not what it used to be.

It’s also deeply frustrating to watch a play that you probed and tested limits on get blown to smithereens when shared with a general public audience. A natural skepticism of beginners is only rational when the vicious cycle keeps repeating.

You’re probably thinking to yourself that this was a lot of words to essentially shrug and say “it depends”. That’s totally fair, but I don’t think I was changing any steadfast opinions today anyway. 

I just want us old heads to think back to our early days when we see a well-intentioned (and well thought out) question from someone earlier on.

And more consequentially, I want beginners to consider how frustrating it must be to have a play go from extremely lucrative to zero overnight. Depending on how full time of a gig you make this, a play dying is like getting fired.

Here’s one final relevant thought to end the week – if you are getting messages that seem disproportionate to something you shared, you may just be on the right track. I’d recommend writing it down in a note before you delete it. 

Murakoze!

Quick note – I’m not really big on self promotion, but if you’re reading this, you’re one of the few people that this is relevant for. There is a signup form on the website for launch notifications to something cool I’m working on with some friends. If that sounds interesting to you, we’d love to let you know when it’s ready to go. If not, no worries!

Today has been a particularly challenging day in the churning and MS world, so I thought I’d write up a quick mini post to comment on it. 

It’s no secret that there’s been a difficult conversation brewing for awhile now about how best to thread the needle between being open and keeping things alive. Everybody has a different opinion, which is to be expected in a diverse community with varied levels of experience and risk tolerance.

Things hit a head this week with the death of a longstanding community stalwart, and it’s continued to spill over from other sources. I understand why people are on edge, and spelling things out step by step on public YouTube videos aren’t exactly contributing to the solution.

This is a tricky hobby, because there is often a mismatch in potential incentives when it comes to sharing things with others.

The play that died this week had been around for a decade, so it’s not crazy to assume it is safe to share everywhere. 

But that old assumption clearly isn’t safe as a blanket statement anymore. Everything is fine until it’s not – just look back to the conversations we were having a year ago, give or take a couple weeks.

However, as I’ve done my best to stress lately, this does not mean there’s not room for beginners to join now. Some of the heaviest hitters and smartest people I know have been doing this for a fraction of the time I have – where would they be if the community had slammed the door in their face?

The problem isn’t new people in a vacuum – it’s the way in which they’re being given access to sensitive information without the context and knowledge to hit it in a responsible way.

I welcome new people to the community – we need their fresh ideas and perspectives. But as I’ve stressed, handing out a spoonfed .pdf in return for a huge fee and throwing them to the wolves is a major reason we’re in this mess. 

What isn’t talked about enough, especially to beginners, is taking responsibility for your choices and the linked outcomes. There’s a lot of things that can go wrong in MS, and not preparing people for some of them leads to panicked scenarios where something explodes. 

I try to use this framework when writing a new post. If I have even the faintest .01% of doubt that I shouldn’t include a reference in a post, I remove it. I’ll always sleep better knowing I didn’t kill anything off for anyone, even if the post loses a little bite. I don’t want to deal with the consequences of that choice if it goes sideways, no matter how minute the chances are.

It’s the same thing with MS in general. You’ll have the opportunity to do some really profitable things, but generally with consummate risk. We’re all adults here, and you need to be honest with yourself that losing the play, the financial institution, or even the play for the entire community is possible. 

Sure, you could spend $250k a day in perpetuity on at category that isn’t very justifiable, outside of an old cartoon. Just be sure to consider what the potential consequences of that action are – for both you and the community at large.

To sandwich this post with great Hunter S. Thompson quotes – “The edge…there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over.”

Shoh hood!