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

There’s plenty of theses out there in the MS community on risk – pretty much every other blog out there has one. Over the course of your churning and MS career, your risk tolerance will fluctuate too. Plays and loops that once seemed daunting will soon become a ho-hum 30 second checklist item each day, week, or month. 

The conventional wisdom in the community is that you should grow and scale your ability to do things that feel risky (within reason, of course). In most cases, this is the correct choice, but don’t forget that risk is only one half of the equation that you should be evaluating. 

Just because you’ve successfully done things that fly in the face of the status quo doesn’t automatically mean you’re invincible and should proceed with another risky idea without considering the reward side of the equation. 

Taking a huge risk can be worth it with a huge reward, and there’s nothing wrong with a low reward when it’s both low risk and low on time spent. But over time, your increased risk tolerance can lead to viewing things as either low risk or high reward when that isn’t true. 

Let’s look at an example in both the churning and MS world to illustrate how you can approach these situations in a balanced way.

Situation 1: Low risk leaked links

Credit card application links sourced from non-official sources have been a part of the game for as long as I’ve been playing it. There’s some level of a spectrum of risk with these, since some are links that are legitimately part of a targeted promo vs. those that are generated via brute force. 

They’ve generally been ok to use, until they aren’t. Using a leaked link is probably low risk, but my litmus test for whether to use one has primarily been weighted by the reward side of the equation, not whether I think there is any shut down risk associated with it. 

There was some drama this year related to a leaked link that was one of the few churning stories to hit the mainstream (and was the impetus for writing my first post on risk). It didn’t end up being a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but it also wasn’t worth the trouble it caused. 

The max value of using the leaked link vs. the “official” one was somewhere between $200 and $260. Not an insignificant amount of money, but as you’ve probably learned over time, that is not an amount worth losing a relationship with a major issuer – regardless of the fact that the risk is low. 

There are other links of dubious origin that have a very different risk to reward equation compared to the above example – i.e. the difference between using the link and not vs ranges somewhere more like $2000-$5000 vs $0. That is a much more appealing risk vs. reward equation, especially when the risk was low to begin with. 

Situation 2: $25k of spend

Let’s say you had a credit card with a $25k credit limit and an uncapped 4% bonus category that you had the ability to MS. In theory, that’s a nice $1,000/mo profit. How nice that actually is depends on your ability to acquire quickly and liquidate cheaply, but for the sake of the argument, let’s pretend it takes 2 hours a month and you can liquidate it for 0% (wishful thinking going into 2026, but let’s try to manifest it 🦄) 

You realize that a $500/hr rate to go chat with cashiers and get out of the house is pretty good, so you decide to cycle your $25k limit once and spend $50k this month so you earn $2,000 instead, even though the card is a personal card and it’s unclear whether the issuer is ok with this activity. 

In the spirit of #alwaysbeprobing, this is something I’d recommend giving a try. An extra $1,000 at $500/hr is solid for 99.9% of us, and it gives you valuable data points about where the limits are. And if cycling once is enough to get the ban hammer, you probably weren’t retiring on this play to begin with. 

On the flip side – let’s say you wanted to spend another $25k on your cards to wrap up the year, but your play was a slightly different angle. For the sake of illustration, let’s say it was the precious metals play that most of us are hitting (no, it’s not a secret, but why call it out in public more than it already has been?)

You have the ability to earn approximately 5% on the purchase thanks to the card (and the issuer), the volatility of said precious metal, and maybe you still have some store-issued rebate cap left. 

Buying the membership-linked limit of one SKU would cost you somewhere around $22,000 at current spot pricing, earning you $1,100 at 5%. Not half bad, and if there’s an absence of cycling, it’s very low risk. 

But it’s also the holidays, and you’re traveling. You could try ordering and shipping to wherever you are. But between address related quirks with the vendor, delivery verification, and having limited visibility into who signed for it and where it ended up, this is a lot riskier than it appears. 

It’s great to make four figures with minimal effort and time spent, but this situation is simply not worth the risk of the package ending up somewhere it’s not supposed to. You aren’t losing a random credit union relationship like you are in the above example – you’re risking something between a colossal headache that may mediate in your favor and pouring $22,000 down the drain.  

To sum it up into a tl;dr that I probably should have included at the start of this tome instead of the end, getting uncomfortable with taking risks is a huge part of the path from shrimp to dolphin to whale. However, don’t let an increased appetite for risk cloud your ability to factor in what you actually stand to earn as a result of that risk. Going big is great, but make sure you’re going big for a reason.

Iechyd da!

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!

When I was a kid, I was obsessed with Pokemon cards (like most kids were back in those days). My parents used to take me to Books-A-Million on Saturdays for Pokemon League, which was essentially a chance to both trade cards and play competitively. At Pokemon League, I learned exactly what asymmetric negotiation was, as both the duper and the dupee. 

There was an adult man that used to attend that was essentially the encyclopedia entry for a neckbeard. Because he was an adult and had a job, he had the financial resources needed for booster boxes and releases that had only come out in Japan and hadn’t been released in the states yet. 

I remember I traded a complete (and valuable) haul of rare holographic cards for a single Japanese holo that he had, because I wanted to be able to show off that I had a card that hadn’t been released in the US yet. I didn’t understand that he had access to more resources than me, and therefore I was at a disadvantage in negotiations.

On the flipside, a couple months later, I traded a handful of fairly useless trainer cards to a much younger kid for the vaulted holographic Charizard from the original base set. That poor kid had no idea what he had. After my mom tore into me for taking advantage of a kid who didn’t know any better, I realized he had placed a bunch of stickers on the back of the Charizard anyway, rendering it valueless.

Whenever negotiations rely on having strong subject matter knowledge, there’s always room for some asymmetric negotiation. Churning and MS are no different. 

As we’ve covered, there is a market for pretty much every point, mile, certificate, or Amex coupon that you can possibly earn. But just because there’s somebody willing to take it off your hands doesn’t mean there’s a straightforward way to understand the value of your haul. 

I think it’s particularly a problem at the beginner to intermediate level – people that are able to generate some level of spend and points, but aren’t fully comprehending the cottage industry marketplace that exists for those points.

Regardless of whether someone is buying for personal use or acting as a middleman for somebody else, there is clear motivation for them to pay the smallest amount possible. It’s either less out of pocket, or higher margin for them with the end user. 

With the amount of relatively new churners out there the last couple of years coupled with the flood of market supply, there have been lots of opportunities for people (especially buyers) to put profits over people. 

Of course, it’s important to be clear-eyed – we’re all here to make money and travel, and chances are you fell into this hobby due to your tenacious appetite for a good deal. But getting a good deal for yourself isn’t mutually exclusive from it being a good deal for the counterparty as well. 

As always, I’ll use a recent example to illustrate. A few months ago, there was an extremely lucrative card linked offer that showed up for many of us in the community. While it was only possible to game through underground methods, there was a very legitimate usage of the offer for almost anyone with a business that dealt in goods, to the point that it was almost like a large percentage off on groceries for a normal household. 

Early on, the market value was erratic and split between buyers who understood the value of the offer and set a good-faith bid vs. others who threw out a price that sounded good to a beginner but was a small fraction of the true value. 

Over time, the low bids were forced to go multiples beyond the original – but only because there were more honest people offering higher prices without competition and sellers willing to wait for the right offer. 

Ultimately, taking that lower price in the interest of a quick cash out hurts both your wallet and the marketplace at large. In a community that is largely self-moderated, recent data points and trust is all we have to go on.

This isn’t slander of the demand side of the equation, either. Buyers provide a necessary service, and again, thanks to self-moderation, are largely trustworthy. But there will always be people looking to take advantage of others who don’t fully understand the value of what they’re holding, and it’s a net negative on the marketplace. 

My advice to budding sellers – if you don’t know what something is worth, ask. Most advanced MSers would much rather argue about the market value of something vs. answering something that is already discussed ad nauseam on TPG. 

And for buyers – get your margin and/or value, but don’t forget that the person you’re buying from is a potential future collaborator that is worth more than making a quick buck from a beginner. 

To this day, I still feel bad about that Charizard holo. If it makes you feel any better, I ended up selling my entire Pokemon card collection on eBay for like $100 in the aughts when Pokemon had fizzled out, and it likely would have been worth a ton now. I got what I deserved – lesson learned. 

Good luck on your cashout ventures, friends.

æгас цу!

I was lucky to spend the last couple of weeks in the Caribbean (including the truly great Hermitage Bay) so I tried to be at least somewhat unplugged and not spend too much time thinking about churning and MS. More on that trip at some point in the future, but for the one sentence summary – Hermitage Bay is one of the very few churning hotels that lives up to the hype, and I can’t think of a better way to use a Hilton FNC.

Regardless of how much I tried to avoid spending much time on churning the last couple of weeks, since it is 2025, the gods of MS had to deliver one more volley before the year ended, and I ended up thinking about it more than I wanted to. 

Since banks love to use vague blanket wording that is approved by their legal team, nobody really knows for sure if this is as big of a blow as it seems to be or not. But regardless, this is another good example of not spending too much time worrying about things that are 100% out of our control, and we’re just going to have to wait and see (and start probing for alternative options). 

But what do you have control over as more and more plays die and limits are imposed? You can’t change the downstream effect of a dead play, shutdown, or something similar. But you can start working on the diversification and creative thinking that is clearly going to be required to thrive in 2026. 

A lot of people were one trick ponies the last few years, and I don’t blame them. Why deal with things like the volatility of precious metals or the time suck of buying gebits if you didn’t need to? But as more and more people flocked to mindless couch MS, the writing was on the wall that it wasn’t going to be sustainable for long.

And with the spigot of endless points starting to be turned off for many, there’s going to be quite a bit of attrition coming in the near future. For example, I frequently see people asking how to meet Amex SUBs in this current state. There’s many different ways that are still alive, and plenty of them aren’t remotely secret. 

You just need to pop on your collared shirt, grab a box of cookies, and don your social engineering hat. But for a cohort that never did that, that seems more daunting than it really is. I say this not to belittle people that haven’t done these things – it’s more of a push to evaluate things like street MS that were here way before this current era, and will be for quite awhile after. 

I fully expect MS to be trickier in 2026, but I also think that there will be plenty of opportunity out there for people who are willing to do some creative thinking to figure it out. More importantly, you won’t be hitting a method that’s also being hit by every rando who saw a reddit ad and joined a Substack anymore. 

Anyway, as my friend (and guest poster) Will memed it, hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times. I’ll let you decide for yourself where you think we are in this sequence, but I’m optimistic that we’re closer to another beginning of the cycle than recent news would make it appear. 

But to get back to those good times, we’re going to have to get through some hard times first. There’s still a universe of plays out there to be hit, you just need to know where to look (and do some probing of your own). The next big thing isn’t going to be spelled out verbatim for beginners in a Substack post. 

我们都会漂浮在水面上。