Note for the youngins: I don’t actually love plays dying, go watch this old classic

February 1 brought some bad news in the churning world. While it’s a pretty big deal that affects a lot of us, I think we can peg this as one last “screw you” provided by 2025, since it was announced all the way back in December.

I think a lot of us didn’t believe that a company infamous for its terrible IT would actually succeed at implementing this change, but they probably had Claude figure it out since no humans that work there seem to be able to.

In a vacuum, this one sucks pretty bad. It was one of those widespread plays where the only people who weren’t affected had already been shutdown for having too much fun riding their bike. 

The play ensured that “the math mathed” for expensive couch MS, made street MS very much worth the time, and even kept this issuer top of wallet for a ton of organic spend. 

But while it has been around for eons in MS years, it wasn’t the key to early retirement outside of very isolated, stroke of luck cases that most of us didn’t have access to. 

The greater issuer ecosystem guard rails ensured that this dead play was a very nice extra bonus, but ultimately, it was just that – an extra bonus. It made things like MSing status a no brainer, but it wasn’t scalable on a true whale level like Amex or other issuers are.

One of the only windows they gave us to make truly meaningful amounts of profit in the ecosystem slammed shut even faster than I expected (and was likely one of the straws that broke the camel’s back anyway).

It’s ok to be sad, pissed, or both that we lost this one. I certainly am. 

But this is just the latest interment into the MS graveyard driven by overexposure – we need to get used to it, because it’s going to continue.

The low hanging fruit that didn’t require a foundation of knowledge (or in some cases, common sense) is all but gone thanks to being force fed to anyone willing to pay a nominal fee.

This might be the copium talking, but isn’t there an obvious silver lining on the flip side of this play dying? Veteran MSers will be the first to tell you that this environment wasn’t sustainable, and we were long overdue to cull the herd. 

It sucks to lose something easy, but it sucks much worse when you’re unwilling to put in the effort to find things that aren’t so obvious. There are a lot of people that are going to move away from the hobby, reducing the pressure on some of the things that are still alive and lowering the risk of making an ill-advised call to a target. 

As my friend the legendary Jen Taylor put it – there’s such a huge difference between finding something and gradually testing the limits vs providing a step by step script to anyone willing to subscribe to your Substack for a month. 

To the beginners who joined the game recently – it’s not your fault that you ended up here at this time. Honestly, I think this is a really interesting time to be a beginner. With massive attrition coming to the hobby soon, there will be room to learn and contribute in a way that was difficult to do in these last few noisy years. 

As always, there’s still plenty of avenues for profit, and new ones are being discovered daily. While this was the most high profile flavor of this play, it was just one of many, many targets offering it. 

For a positive example – the average whale is much more concerned about a different flavor of this play. However, that one has been pushed fully underground due to overexposure and overzealous churner contact with zero common sense. That play is still very much alive and kicking for smart people who planned ahead while being much more insulated from zero-effort scripts. 

So, let’s pour one out for what was an amazing run with amazing ROI, while being realistic that it was being shouted from the rooftops, and this was always going to be the end result. 

While some people will say that churning and MS are dead, I hope that means they’ll leave and make room for hungry newcomers that are willing to roll up their sleeves and do some probing. This is definitely one of the best times in the last few years to do so.

Enjoy having a few extra minutes back in each week now, and take this as a lesson to plan ahead when given the opportunity to do so. You’re all set, my friends.

Skál!

Pictured: Enjoying a lovely sunset while literally chasing cetaceans

One of the best things about churning and MS is the ability to do whatever you want, whenever you want for travel. Earning a ton of points and miles means that you can fulfill your travel wishes, regardless of whether that means relaxed Wyndhams and short domestic hops or Q-Suites and SLHs in Myanmar. 

While that freedom is amazing, it rarely extends far beyond partners and dependents. While there are times that you get to involve others in your churning spoils, real life often gets in the way, regardless of whether it’s free for them or not. 

For those reasons, “making it out of the group chat” can be really difficult. For fellow uncs like myself (i.e. people who also needed to Google the phrase), it essentially means finally doing that thing that you and friends and/or family are always planning in a group chat, knowing full well that it’s very unlikely to actually occur. 

I have a list many pages long of all of the things I’ve tried to do collectively with friends and family as a result of churning and MS, but can count on one hand how many of them actually panned out. All of this means it’s really exciting when the stars align and everyone can get together. 

This past weekend, I was lucky to make it out of the group chat with a handful of fellow churners. Meetups like this make me understand for the faintest millisecond why mid-level managers have such an irrational need to make people come into the office for jobs that don’t require it. 

While you can banter online all day long, it will never quite match being able to get together in person to share wins, losses, and everything in between. 

You’d be surprised how many extremely profitable blind spots you have revealed to you in a weekend just through a high-level discussion of your business-as-usual plays. And no, I’m not talking about unicorns. 

No matter how much time you spend probing, there are things you will inevitably miss, and a casual conversation over a Globalist breakfast is a much better place to get to the bottom of it than a loud channel filled with noise. 

And it’s not just about new angles – meetups also give you a chance to do something that a lot of us only get to do infrequently – talk about churning and MS with someone that actually wants to listen and respond back. I’m a firm believer that going to meetups is a great way to reduce extreme P2 boredom, because you can get your need to talk shop out of your system. 

But for me, the most valuable benefits of meetups aren’t from plays shared there (not that those aren’t nice). It’s more so the chance to actually befriend and hang out with your collaborators and learn about them as people beyond the Slack username or Discord handle. It’s so much easier to trust someone with something sensitive when you’ve literally chased cetaceans with them at a meetup. 

As we joked about all weekend, the true networking at big events like Chicago Seminars doesn’t happen during the panels during the day – it goes down at 2am in the lobby bar. I had plenty of conversations that were much less “how are you hitting this” and was much more “your partner has such a cool job – tell me more about that?”

There were also some inspiring stories of all types of travel being shared. One highlight was my friend Chris booking an aspirational trip for a large group of his old friends, paid for thanks to MS. If that isn’t making out of the group chat, I’m not really sure what is. 

Anyway, that’s enough about my weekend. I’m sharing this to illustrate some of the ideas that I’ve written about in the last few months that I think are going to be crucial for MS success moving forward. 

Building a community of like minded, similar level people is extremely helpful from a profit perspective, but it’s also very important from a trust perspective. With longtime plays largely going the way of the dinosaurs and new ones never moving out of DMs and probe groups, it’s not going to be easy to find what you’re looking for.

But most of all, anything is more fun to do with friends. Even if that thing is waking up early to go hit the street MS grind together. 

Happy February, enjoy the rest of your weekend, and good luck on the probing this week.

ߕߜ߭ߍߙߍߝߐ!

I’ve used a lot of real estate on the blog to talk about trust and how it relates to profits in the MS game. Today, I want to go a step further into the importance of trust and community. If it wasn’t already, trust is now a currency in and of itself in the hobby given the environment we’re operating in.

First off, there’s the obvious fact that there’s a finite number of people that are both cut out for and enthusiastic about a hobby and/or side hustle that requires the amount of work that this one does. It’s a pretty small world, and word gets around quickly. 

By and large, the community functions on mutual benefit, and that self-moderation generally leads to most exchanges going smoothly. Maybe not 100% of the time, but close enough, especially given the amount of cash and cash equivalents involved. 

Even with that mutual respect, your trust (and other’s trust in you) will be tested at various points in the game. This trust shows up in very practical situations like:

• You and a fellow churner decide to make a swap, and somebody needs to send their end of the bargain first
• Somebody entrusts you with a sensitive play that isn’t meant to be widely shared
• You float products to some semblance of a buyer’s group (which may also mean that they float to their end user)

Generally, these situations work out well because there’s an understanding that it’s mutually beneficial for both parties for things to go off without a hitch. 

And sometimes, the reputational effect of a choice isn’t directly linked to a low-stakes transaction like sending an acquaintance an Admiral’s Club pass, and is more tied to the health of the community at large.

For example, when you do something like making the choice to go scorched earth on a target and shine a flashing light on the play that the community was collectively profiting from, you can’t be surprised when people are justifiably upset at you. You didn’t kill it for just yourself – you killed it for everyone. 

Ultimately, everyone in this community is a gamer, a gambler, a FIRE adherent, or some combination of all three. Let’s not pretend that we aren’t all here to make money while seeing the world on the cheap.

Earnings and community aren’t mutually exclusive, but the tension between them is very real – and it should make you think carefully before sharing something sensitive.

The fact that so many plays died in 2025 has made the math even more complicated, and I think the tension between the two is only going to get worse. That tension has completely changed how plays are shared. So, what is the right balance for dolphins and whales who care about and want to give back to the community, while also avoiding killing off a good play? 

As discussed a couple of weeks ago, there’s little incentive to bubble anything that remotely approaches unicorn outside of DMs anymore. Sometimes, it feels like the community is grasping at the scraps left behind to figure out how to scale something up that isn’t actually scalable. 

At this point, your reputation in the community and the trust you’ve earned with fellow churners is going to matter more than ever. Simply joining a paid group and being instantly introduced to the easiest MS of all time isn’t viable anymore, because the big banks are clearly done being abused in such an easily recognizable way. 

There’s plenty of smart people out there in the community that are still finding amazing plays, but networking and bringing something to the table yourself is going to be necessary if you want to be involved. 

So, where are the killer plays that make or break your MS year in 2026 going to come from? My crystal ball is looking a little murky, but I think it’s going to look different than it has the last few years. 

For the time being, keep building those relationships with like minded probers. There’s strength in numbers, and your unicorn might be just around the corner.

祝你们的调查顺利，我的朋友们！

Pictured: the kind of direct dopamine hit that Zoomers can only dream of

I think my boredom of writing about Bilt is only matched by your boredom of reading about it, so let’s do something more fun for a Friday before many of us prepare to bunker down for a stormy weekend.

Despite being somewhere around the median person described in the /r/churning demographic survey every year, a lot of my closest collaborators are somewhat older or younger than me, give or take a few years.

I think there’s a ton of positive output that comes out of working with people in a different cohort because they approach things in a different way. That being said, readers younger and older than me likely won’t have the same feeling of nostalgia for today’s hijinks. Don’t worry, I’ll set some context!

Regardless of how you feel about social media, you can’t deny that the dominant platform of the time left an indelible mark of the generation that was coming of age then.

For elder millennials, Gen X and beyond, you had access to the early platforms- things like bulletin boards, IRC, Xanga and Livejournal.

For Gen Z and younger, you were bombarded by Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook post-college requirement, Vine, Periscope, TikTok, YikYak, the list goes on and on.

But somewhere in between those cohorts was (in my humble opinion) the golden age of social media – MySpace. Connected enough to find something new outside of your network, but not completely beholden to an ever-evolving algorithm, MySpace felt like it struck the balance between fun and toxicity (let’s just ignore that whole top 8 thing, ok?)

One big difference between MySpace and all of the modern platforms was that it wasn’t centered around an activity feed of your friends. That doesn’t mean there wasn’t a way to share activity, though. Bulletins were messages that showed in a small secondary feed that all of your friends could see.

There were many ways that bulletins were used, but no doubt the most iconic usage was MySpace surveys. Essentially “never have I ever” turned into a quantifiable score, these surveys were a fun way to share tastes in music and movies or lie about things that you hadn’t actually done to look cooler to classmates.

So, in honor of that more simple time of “rawr XD”, “PC4PC” and “*holds up spork*”, I vibe coded the MS & churning edition for you to take for funsies.

Click here to take the survey.

Let me know what category you end up in! For those of you staring down the barrel of some serious snowfall this weekend, good luck. This feels like a great weekend to run some couch plays instead.

Kuchemerera!

Pictured: What we’ve lost as a result of no longer having MySpace

Pictured: Charles de Gaulle when he was a child, aka the current adult height of butterboy

Editor’s note: Thanks to my friend, and one of the funniest churners I know, the vertically challenged butterboy, for today’s guest post. Only he could look at 20th-century French history and see a metaphor for churning/MS. Enjoy the post!

History has the remarkable power to inform us on a variety of topics, and, in particular, historical figures can teach us valuable lessons about subjects seemingly unrelated. Today, on my dear friend Riley’s blog, it would be my pleasure to share some thoughts about Charles de Gaulle, Gaullism, and how I believe they relate to our hobby of churning and manufactured spend.

If you have ever read about or studied General Charles de Gaulle, a single word will pop into your head: France. The General, who saved France twice over the course of his life, was born into a fiercely patriotic family in the Third French Republic. From a young age, he idolized France, studying her history, crying when he learned of her military defeats. As soon as he was able, he joined the French military, fighting in the First World War. Later, as France succumbed to the tyranny sweeping the European continent, he saved the reputation of France from collaboration as the leader of the Free French. Again, when colonial squabbles and military putschists threatened the institutions of the Fourth French Republic, de Gaulle returned from his retirement to save her once more. 

To take away one lesson from history, Charles de Gaulle allowed himself to be consumed by one thing: France. France, the grandeur of France, and advancing French interests were the sole focus of de Gaulle throughout his whole life. De Gaulle became associated with an amorphous ideology called Gaullism. To its proponents, Gaullism was not a checklist of policies but a mindset: the relentless actualization of France’s independence, prestige, and power. In this, it was broadly successful.

In churning, I see many of my peers spread thin. They dabble in a variety of targets and banks, but they lack a clear direction. They miss the opportunity to maximize their limited time and effort by focusing on what they do best and what they can scale, instead favoring a shallow familiarity with everything. Did the General understand every nuance of domestic and foreign policy? Of course not. Did he make massive gaffes that exposed his blind spots? Absolutely. But the General maximized his impact on the world through tunnel vision about France. I believe many of us who churn would benefit from behaving more like the General – picking our “France” and committing to it fully.

As for your “France,” I cannot say. You already know what it is.

-butterboy

Pictured: How butterboy sees Charles de Gaulle

Editor’s Note: Sorry these are coming at you fast and furious. This post was originally scheduled for earlier in the week, but Richard Kerr and Bilt messed up my editorial calendar. At least it’s been good to brush up on multiplication tables?

The churning and MS community has some level of natural cyclicity and, well, churn to it. For example, the start and end of the year is always more buzzy as the last chance to finish up things tied to annual caps and the first chance to knock them out again hours into the new year. Widespread shutdowns generally coax a lot of people out of hibernation, too. 

Even on a personal level, you might get slammed at work or have something going on with family and friends that necessitates a step back, at least temporarily. 

All of this to say that we all have a lot going on both including and excluding MS, and it’s only natural to see plenty of names wax and wane depending on what’s going on (outside of victims of email jobs like myself who are chronically around).

However, this truth hasn’t stopped me from hearing a lot of chatter lately across the churnosphere that essentially boils down to “I haven’t heard from X in awhile – they used to be such a big contributor, where did they go?”. 

There’s plenty of reasons someone might not be around, and in some cases, it’s just because they’re busy. But in 2026, it might also be that they’ve decided to take a break from sharing sensitive things in groups that are private, but don’t feel as private anymore. 

The whales (and dolphins even) have seen so many good things die in the last couple years that sharing something outside of a probe group suddenly feels like it has zero utility compared to a few years ago.

It’s partially a symptom of how easy MS has been lately, of course – sharing a new target now is very different than sharing a particular Kroger in rural Michigan that DGAF how many gift cards you buy, because everybody can start hitting it without it being necessary to take a flight to Frankenmuth (I chose Frankenmuth because of the funny name, but it actually looks quite lovely!) 

I understand why many heavy hitters are choosing now as the time to reconsider their feelings towards sharing, even in private. We’re losing easy levers by the day, and no amount of Slack, Discord or Telegram reactions can bring them back. 

But I also understand why beginners and more intermediate players are bummed out to see those handles gradually disappear from the private groups – that build up of knowledge gleaned from years of grinding is really insightful when you’re trying to scale up. 

So, are whales actually going extinct? While the fintechs and banks are certainly trying a little too hard to pretend they’re the captain of the Pequod, there’s still enough low hanging fruit out there to make the juice worth the squeeze. 

What is a shrimp or reef fish to do? If it were me, I’d work towards scaling to a bigger body of water or finding a group of like-minded fish ready to grow together. The only constant is change, and the game will continue to change in both good and bad ways over the next year. But now that MS can be done fully from the couch, I wouldn’t count on sharing ever returning in quite the same way it used to be.

Prost!