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!

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！