I've been playing this game for about six years now. In that time I've earned and burned just over 2.5 million points.

Certainly the game isn't as easy as it used to be but it's still very lucrative if you're dedicated. Can't churn the Citi AA cards as frequently anymore, and anyways AA devalued their award chart. No more Cathay Pacific first class for 67.5k. United's devaluation a few years back was pretty painful as well.

I still accrue United and American points, there are enough ways to get a decent amount and wring a redemption out of them once a year or so, but most of my focus is on foreign or smaller programs.

Lately I've put all my energy towards Singapore Airlines and Alaska Air. Alaska often sells points cheaply enough that's it's worth it to just buy the points and redeem for partner redemptions. I did that recently and booked SFO-HKG-AKL on Cathay Pacific in first class for 80k points. Buying the 40k I needed was <$600. Well worth it.

Singapore Airlines is a transfer partner with all the transferrable currencies (Chase, Citi, Amex and SPG) which makes earning there easy. The award chart is a bit steep but there are some good deals. My return from that Cathay flight is a Singapore award for AKL-SYD-SIN-NRT-SFO-DEN on Air New Zealand, Singapore Airlines and United with the long-hauls all in first class. I think it was around 120k miles.

I started this game in college when my only goal was free travel—managed to earn enough points before graduation to buy myself a "free" round-trip ticket to Thailand in order to backpack around Southeast Asia for the summer. Now that I have substantially more money, I generally use points to enable cheap premium cabin travel, like buying points when they're on sale from Alaska or LifeMiles and essentially getting deep-discount first or business class tickets.

I've hit most of the cliche churner experiences at this point: being driven in a Porsche to your flight from the Lufthansa first class terminal, Etihad's first class apartment, taste-testing both Dom and Krug in a Singapore Suite. It's an absurd hobby.

And it's a hobby that takes monumental amounts of time to keep up with. Want to book Cathay via Alaska? Better know to ask to agent to look at the right screen on her computer. How do you know that? Because you've been following a 5,000-post thread over on Flyertalk about it. Knowing when and how to correctly apply for your next Citi card means you're following a similar thread over in that part of Flyertalk. Keeping up with the details like that is time consuming. I enjoy the detail work but I don't really know why.

This hobby lets me go on generally two international vacations in first class each year for very little money. I'll be spending three weeks in New Zealand later this year, with time in Hong Kong, Singapore and Tokyo along the way. Last year I spent a week in Tokyo with friends before making my way back via Shanghai, Hong Kong and Dubai—two of those were new cities to me.

I've somehow become very, very good at one of the world's silliest skills.

That said, I have absolutely gotten off a first class fight only to check in to a hostel. Luxury travel actually gets pretty damn boring after about 24 hours IMO. Nothing is less interesting than flying to the other side of the world only to stay in a Hilton marginally nicer than the one in your home town.