I'll admit it's more work than many of the promos. I did it for the first time last fall and went from 0 to 156K US miles in two months (including the Barclay's card app for 40K to get a credit card hit). It is fairly easy to complete the first two levels of the Slam without much effort or money. I stayed organized by creating a separate email folder to contain all of my purchases, hotel reservations, rental car reservations, point transfer confirmations, etc., associated with the promo. I also went with things I could count on--nothing that looked like it was playing on the edges. I swung 36 times and got 36 hits. And if a moron like me can do it, well. . .

After the first couple of levels, it's just a question of how far you want or need to go. It helps that I had rental car needs that easily garnered a number of hits and since I credit my rental cars to hotels or airlines anyway, I didn't mind funneling my earnings to US.

Working with travel that I needed to do and some point transfers from hotel programs where either I had tons of points so didn't mind making the transfers (SPG and Choice) or I don't feel that the earnings rate gets me very far (BW and Hilton--with Hilton I've concluded that credit card bonuses are the only way to go), I found it relatively easy to get to 60K miles. After that, I had to make some choices that I might or might not make again this fall depending on my anticipated travel on US.

As you say, your tolerance for much of what is required depends on how much you like playing games.

By the way, BW 10K point packages still available as of 5:30 p.m. EDT.