Thanks for hanging in there with me while I was on vacation. Taking it (somewhat) easy on the MS front for a couple of weeks is funny in 2026 because it’s enough time for a phoenix play to come back… and effectively die again. 

This is a spiritual successor to this post, and it leans on some OG wisdom from my all time favorite MEAB post. 

These events got me thinking about how best to be efficient when probing new plays – and more importantly, new plays with longevity. 

There’s a lot of churning manpower spent on keeping the always be probing mantra alive. Between credit union fee schedules, fintech industry publications and crypto app charts, there’s a plethora of places for tracking down your next unicorn. 

Honestly, once you know what you’re looking for, it’s not that hard to start finding the kind of plays that easily add a nice bump to your bottom line.

Significantly more difficult is finding one that is both scalable enough to be meaningful, while also being tolerant enough to be more than a one time boost – most of us end up with one or the other.

There are many elements that play into the scalability and risk tolerance of any given target, but like many other things in life, it always comes back to money. Factors like which department the budget is tied to, the total assets under management, or the size of the venture capital war chest all play a part. 

Why? Because they determine what KPIs are being used to measure success, how big a loss is before it becomes a problem, and most importantly, who is actually footing the bill for all of these interchange fees. 

Adding this extra layer of evaluation will help you prioritize where to send that first deposit or test spend while improving your ability to do the napkin math on how long you have before someone there asks, “what exactly is your use case for this product?”

Pictured: Lion hearted MSer butterboy on his way to Harris Teeter

While not all of this info is available publicly, you’ll get better at inferring it over time. And anything related to AUM and funding is generally part of public filings, so that should be easy to find. It’s time to add Crunchbase as yet another place to query in your probing toolkit.

For example – if I was probing fintechs, I’d be happy to see a big funding round led by a name like Paradigm, Sequoia or a16z. Meanwhile, while probing credit unions, I’d be disheartened to see AUM much smaller than their competitors. 

The overall size of a target from a financial perspective is also useful for inferring the headcount of the company and the red tape that comes with it.

While this is far from a blanket statement, in general, large companies are required to move slower, need more approvals to take action, and are likely to have their data spread across disparate sources.  

This can be an advantage as an MSer, because it will take them longer to realize that MSers aren’t exactly profitable customers and even longer still to actually do something about it. 

Speaking as a cog in the machine at a large conglomerate – it takes overwhelming pressure for anything to actually change as a result of the insights generated by the doers. 

On the flip side of this, the agility and agency that smaller companies have can also be helpful to MSers, because new technologies and platforms that fit into your MS tool belt are more likely to be implemented quicker at smaller places. 

My major takeaway from this little tome is that there’s opportunity at every size and scale of target, but that there are other indicators outside of the obvious that you can use for your vetting to help you choose where to start first.

If it were me, I’d keep my eyes open for the low hanging fruit at archaic corporations (likely stable, but with a scalability cap) and at small startups (potentially valuable, but probably short-lived) while looking for unicorns that fit some additional criteria.

Targets somewhere in that shmedium-medium range that are forward-thinking enough to have intriguing functionality while also having the financial resources (and aggressive growth goals) associated with institutional backing would be my call for the first rock to check under.

Good luck on the hunt this week.

Sorakan!

There’s been a handful of posts made in the community about specialization and finding what you’re good at – by me, by guest authors here, and guest authors on MEAB. 

I’ve always believed in diversification of plays to avoid one shutdown completely killing you, even if that means accepting some low-hanging fruit that isn’t super exciting on the surface. 

But just because you’re dabbling in a bunch of different things doesn’t mean you don’t end up naturally gravitating towards a particular category of churning and MS that best fits your preferences and situation. 

Whether that means hyper-focusing on one scalable play in a category, or running a variety of similar plays that add up to a meaningful bottom line, figuring out what general area of MS you’re best at makes everything more enjoyable.

There’s a lot of different factors to consider when deciding which MS category to focus on most, and each has pros and cons. 

For example, street MS is more stable and has been around forever. But it also requires free time and proximity to certain brick and mortar locations. 

Gambling can be extremely lucrative for both spend generation and liquidation, but carries additional risk and even stricter geolocation.

Probing new fintech channels from your couch removes some of the physical limitations and can be done in less time. But the community’s appetite for a new couch MS panacea means that new platforms are going to get absolutely clobbered, and if you aren’t a whale, there may not be much to earn. 

Beyond of the inherent qualities of each category, you also want to make sure that the category you gravitate towards fits your own preferences.

Do you love talking to people and social engineering? Street MS is a great fit for you. And if you don’t like talking to people? That’s ok too, but you shouldn’t force yourself to spend hours a day at the money services counter if you hate it.

Are you super risk-averse? Then you probably don’t want to take up dealing with offshore casinos. Do you lack the ability to get to your local warehouse store a few minutes before opening? Good luck beating the local arbers to the jackpot. 

I’ve always been a big proponent of finding your probe group, and I think this idea of specialization fits really well within a small group too. If everyone has a handful of things they’re really good at, the whole group can scale into areas that individuals might not know as well.

For example, due to where I live, I can’t do precious metals arbing at the scale a lot of you are. But I’ve been able to take advantage of opportunities when they present themselves because I’m fortunate to know people who know that category extremely well. And in return, I can fill them in on what they missed while chowing down on a chicken bake. 

So, what’s the next step? If you haven’t already figured it out, it’s time to take a look at your situation and the facts of each specialization to determine what makes the most sense for you to focus on. 

It took me awhile to figure it out, but I’m glad I did. There’s less spinning your wheels on things that aren’t really moving the needle. Good luck figuring out what it is for you!

Puɔ̈th miɛt!

Pictured: a MSer doing their daily check for the return of a lucrative avenue

Apologies for the lapse in posts – I am halfway around the world scuba diving and unplugging has been really nice. Now I understand why Matt finds guest posters for his end of year vacation. Enjoy today’s post!

When plays die, there’s a tendency to talk about it more openly and analyze exactly what went wrong. After all, if it’s dead, there’s little harm in being more open about it, right? 

Even if you were unaware of the play during its lifetime, the postmortem is helpful in understanding what to look for in future probing. 

However, while some plays are truly six feet under when they die (a timely example being the sudden implosion of Mesa), others become useless from an MS perspective without disappearing completely.

Whether it’s a change in earn rate, accepted payment method or some other variable, plenty of platforms and channels that were previously a valuable part of a loop continue on with zero utility for MSers (not that I’m not self aware enough to blame the platform for attempting to eliminate gaming).

These situations are somehow even more frustrating than the play being killed off completely, because at least there’s full closure when a loop gets nuked from orbit. There’s no closure in deleting the app or saved login when you’re holding on to a chance that the glory days may return. 

As my eloquent friend smugdog said, depressed MSers who lost a play are “like my old dog that once found a cupcake in a bush on a walk once and then checked that bush every day for the rest of his life”

Finding another cupcake in the bush is pretty damn rare, but that doesn’t mean it’s impossible. I can think of plenty of “dead plays” that rose like a phoenix from the ashes, and often in forms that blew the previous iteration out of the water. 

There’s generally a short lifespan when these situations present themselves (but not 100% of the time), so when you find one, hit it hard, and hit it fast. 

Since there is potential for a zombie play to be resurrected, it’s a good call to maintain discretion when it’s not fully dead and buried. 

Ironically enough, the actions taken that kill a play the first time are often the same actions that strike down the phoenix version too. What is the fintech equivalent of don’t call the bank? 

While we’re on the subject of friendly advice, there’s something else to add. And believe me when I say this is as much a reminder to myself as it is advice towards you. 

As much fun as getting ahead of yourself with napkin math is when you’re scaling up a free money generator, nothing that good lasts forever in this game. 

Enjoy the ride and profit as much as you can while keeping in mind that the clock begins ticking the day the play is discovered.

It’s quite tempting to start counting the amount of days needed to run a loop before you can buy your dream Rolex, but what happens if it dies somewhere in the middle?

The only person who can depend on that watch is the one earning a cut of your take without the associated risk (and in this case, there was quite a bit of risk unless you really knew your stuff. 

Good luck on the phoenix hunting, friends!

“Gotta spend money to make money” is an annoying axiom in the entrepreneurship world, but it is definitely true. It’s hard to make meaningful profits without investing in the tools and resources you need for your business, and sometimes that means sucking it up when faced with a seemingly pointless cost of business too.

Churning and MS are the same way, though I think a lot of us struggle with that fact mentally. Any hobby that is close enough to FIRE attracts mindsets that seek to avoids unnecessary spending.

But sometimes (a lot of times) you do need to spend money to make money in churning and MS. What that looks like changes as you progress through the MS food chain and become comfortable with paying for things that don’t feel essential, but are very much a cost of doing business. I put together a few examples at different levels of MS lifecycle to help illustrate.

By the way, this is not financial advice, I am not a financial advisor, I am definitely not your financial advisor, etc. etc. But hopefully looking at some of these examples helps you weigh benefits vs. cost when making churning decisions that affect your bottom line.

Shrimp examples

• Paying a big annual fee for a card: Early on, paying a fee that is rapidly approaching four figures is hard to wrap your head around, regardless of mirrored finishes. While it’s simple math to come out ahead with the sign up bonus, let’s not pretend that $600-$900 isn’t a lot of money to pay to wait 2 hours to get into a crowded lounge.
• Paying for a private group: Paying someone for access to a private group feels weird, especially when some of the best sources of new angles are publicly available, (但如果你不懂中文，就很难真正理解。). The true value isn’t the information shared, it’s the networking and friends.

Fish examples

• Paying MS fees: Between percentage fees to load on couch MS and flat fees on street MS, you’re likely to be spending money (and potentially a lot of money, based on scale) to build up your points reserve before you liquidate. This comes back to the psychology of floating, to a degree
• Paying for churning/MS tools: Much like private groups in the shrimp example, it can feel strange to pay someone a decent chunk of change for access to a tool with a niche application. There’s a lot of tools out there, but they can be worth paying for if they help you increase efficiency, find award space, etc.

Dolphin examples

• Paying to keep cards open post-SUB: Early on, it’s drilled into new churners that they should close every card possible when the annual fee posts, because there’s no SUB to be earned this time around. There’s a lot of nuance towards making that decision as you grow, and the answer isn’t the same for everyone. But there are plenty of examples where the benefit added by having access to that particular credit easily outweighs the annual fee, even if there aren’t blatantly obvious reasons to keep it. 
• Eating an amount of money to avoid issues: This one will occur more and more as you graduate to higher levels of MS spend. Over time, you’ll become less and less likely to invite the scrutiny that comes with things like disputing Facebook Ads fraud or everybody’s favorite CU adding your money to the wrong account. Ultimately, it’s better to take the (hopefully small) L and keep things uncomplicated – especially if said amount is $75.

Whale examples

• Purposely being a bad gambler: I’ve talked about the parallels between gambling and MS in the past, and here’s yet another one. Whether we’re talking about the major sportsbooks or the myriad of less prominent ways to gamble, no casino or book wants to keep consistent winners around. As degen as it may feel to do, purposely doing what amounts to lighting money on fire can actually keep you alive (and profitable) longer.
• “Paying interest” on your credit card: I saved the best for last since this example is so antithetical to beginning churning advice. Hell, beginning financial advice – Dave Ramsey just fell to his knees in a Walmart. But occasionally, interesting opportunities present themselves when you’re a little late on getting around to paying the bill.

Pictured: this blog post, circa 2017 meme format

All this to say that there will always be a cost of doing business associated with playing the game, and that cost will become both increasingly against conventional wisdom, and increasing in scale. But a big part of progression is learning where to accept that cost as a means to reap future profits. 

乾杯！

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!