I'm starting this thread as a companion to The "game" pre Flyertalk

Following are my favorites:

1. Valuemags ---> Concorde

2. Dollar coins
-I even bought a minivan to support this venture

3. Thank You Points for redemptions like ACY-YEG
(this provided around $5,000 in DL credit)

4. Budget car rentals at locations with dirt cheap weekend rates

5. Mistake fares
-these typically lasted for around 7 days during the early years

CNZ (upgraded to F) in 2007!

1. USAir FC $46 Watertown (ART) fares-made both LH SEN and bmi top status with just a few of those;
2. bmi in general: Hertz HLE deals and hotel deals (i.e. <US$15 for 5000 miles though I did get tired of every trip to BKK making a US$5 "checkin" at some run down Chinatown motel there though the one I used in Buenos Aires was just down the calle from the Sheraton Librator so it was easy
3. MH US$260 Z fares ex BKK to PEK which got my Thai GF and me AA EXP in 8 weeks, as I just couldn't do back-to-backs on that lousy MH schedule to PEK and back;
4. Two years (8+ weeks) of "free" Hertz Premium car rentals for $700 between Daily Getaway Hertz points package and eRewards redemptions;
5. Post 9/11 fares to Europe apx US$200 RT immediately UPG'able and VIPOW's in general;
6. #2 all time: Hyatt FFN's where you could use a FFN and got half of the 2 stays needed for another, plus the $39 to $49 rates at Denver Tech Center, HR Cincinnati, and the HR's that Mary2e always used, online check-in and no show still got credit, so I've never paid (retail/rack) for all those nights at PH's in Paris, Zurich and Milan, and the GH in HK; and
6. The big dog of them all: CX FC ex-DAD to NYC for $870, so I finally got to try JFK AA FC Dining.

For some reason I completely forgot about BMI, but yeah that might have been my favourite ffp of all time. Then moving on to BA gold with 500k points from credit card signups was a fine dessert

How could you forget bmi? My favorite too. Used to do 9 segment USAir FC RT's to Freeport and always worked in the PHL-DCA/BWI segments: 90 miles of straight up and straight down for the segment minimum x3.

Oh man, the memories here...

1. Those early Thank You Points days! For some reason I recall the magic number being a $2700 domestic F itin - something like JFK-LAX R/T.

2. The US Airways Grand Slams. That was one where I owe my FT friends for showing me how it was done. Every Grand Slam turned into most of what I needed for 2 J tickets to North Asia and back.

3. The Hyatt FFN's and, in some years, a similar Starwood promo.

4. Marriott's promos were usually lame by comparison, except for one summer when you earned 5,000 DL miles per stay. I hotel-hopped some bad North Dallas Courtyards collecting those miles...room rates in the $30's. Although after the night when a drug bust went down outside my window, I upgraded to the finer area Courtyards which were closer to $45/nt.

5. Marriott Bonus Bucks, Extra Euros, and Premium Pounds. Back when paper certificates were a thing, the world was awash in those.

6. Probably my first Flyertalk-induced promo chase: Hilton's conquest bonuses. Every 4 stays yielded 54,000 bonus points in an era when a 6-night award at the HWV or HHV was 100,000 points. I hotel-hopped Doubletrees and Hamptons in and around Tampa during the course about a month of work trips and paid for 2 weeks in Hawaii. You weren't supposed to be able to repeat an individual conquest, but there were a few slightly-different conquest codes so people earned hundreds of thousands of points through them.

001 ticket stock fuel dumps thanks to Cape Air.

Perhaps the most valuable thing I learned some time back (circa 2003) on FlyerTalk was that all AA miles from all sources counted (back then) toward AA lifetime elite status. So I set out trying to earn AA miles any way I could above all else, and half a year before all that ended (in late 2011), I totaled 2 million lifetime AA miles earned in about 8 years and earned lifetime AA Plat status (second level up) as a result..A good fraction of the actual miles I earned from flying were from double and triple RDM miles bonuses on flights (during the economic downturn) that I learned about on FlyerTalk. I pretty much never fly for work, so this is not something I could have ever achieved otherwise.

Yup. Same. Also got many from refinancing, BankDirect, etc. That was an early big FT win for me too.

Buying U.S.Savings bonds on a credit card with no fee.
Switching long distance land line service between three carriers every 6 months.
Buying money orders at Walmart and other places on a debit card that earned miles.
Buying Amazon and other gift cards at office depot for 5X Ultimate Rewards points.
Switching assets between stock and bond brokerage accounts to get miles bonuses from the new accounts. Easy -the new broker did all the work.

25K Delta points for clicking on a link. I think from DL official email but I wouldn't have known if it's not for FT.
$250 NYC - HNL tix on UA.
US bonds.
Redeeming on UA and DL partners (cheaper!)

There were a few good angles with TYP, but my favorite was that 20k points was sufficient to nab a round trip ticket on any route within N. America with no blackout dates. One of the most popular routes among the FT crowd was Atlantic City to Edmonton on Delta. This entailed a fare break in ATL, so it consisted of two expensive tickets patched together, for a total of around $2600 in Delta credit (after cancellation). The reason it, and other similar secrets, didn't make it to the blogs was because we only discussed in person at FT meetups.

ETA: On second thought, I vaguely recall threads about optimal TYP routes, but they were cryptic enough to keep passing bloggers at bay...similar to the early fuel dump threads.

So the angle was to book the 20,000 ticket and then cancel which would provide a $ credit. Interesting and about what I surmised, but the how to do it was unclear. For what it is worth, I recall picking up a sniff of it from the old chat feature. No idea if that still exists, but it was basically a big chat room that anyone could enter and participate in or just observe. Back in my more rambunctious days I'd logon late night if other options didn't pan out

That should be in the "before FlyerTalk" thread. I used to do that in the 80s.