A TPG editor turned a routine ticket buy — three seats to see the Portland Timbers with visiting parents, about $180 in total — into roughly 3,800 points and miles, worth around $77. The trick wasn't a fancy premium card or a welcome bonus. It was stacking three separate rewards mechanisms on a single purchase, and most of them work with cards many people already own.
The base layer came from the Chase Freedom Flex, which for Q3 2026 offered select live entertainment as one of its rotating 5% bonus categories (activation required, capped at $1,500 of combined quarterly category spend). Since the card effectively earns Ultimate Rewards points that can be converted to transferable points with an eligible card, that meant about 900 points on the ticket purchase alone — five times what a flat 1x card would have earned.
The second layer was Rove, a free-to-join shopping portal whose miles transfer to more than 20 airline and hotel partners, including a few no credit card program offers, such as Frontier Miles and Lufthansa Miles & More. Buying the StubHub tickets through Rove's portal at 6.5 miles per dollar added over 1,100 miles. The catch: portal rewards post slowly — in this case possibly not until early December. You also need to start the purchase in the Rove app, on the website or via its browser extension, and disable competing portal extensions if you use them.
The final layer was Paze. Chase cardholders currently earn 10 extra Ultimate Rewards points per dollar when checking out with Paze at select merchants through Dec. 31, and StubHub qualifies. That added roughly 1,800 points — the biggest single chunk of the haul. One practical wrinkle: Paze failed to work on mobile but succeeded first try on desktop, and the checkout confirmation didn't mention Paze at all, though the points landed within days. A screen recording of the purchase is a sensible backup if you're nervous.
The takeaway isn't that everyone should chase ticket promotions. It's that welcome bonuses are finite — open enough cards and the juicy offers dry up — so knowing how to squeeze routine purchases is what keeps a rewards balance growing between sign-ups. The playbook is simple: check your card's quarterly categories and current promotions, compare shopping portals (Rakuten and Rove among them) via a site like Cashback Monitor, and look for extra wallet promos like the Paze offer before you check out. Live entertainment appears as a Freedom Flex quarterly category reliably most years, so this specific triple-stack is likely repeatable in 2027. For anyone new to the Freedom Flex, there's a $250 cash back (25,000 points) offer after $500 spend in three months, though it's ending soon.
It's a bit of effort for each purchase, but the payoff — points that quietly accumulate toward a future trip — is exactly the kind of habit worth building.
Reported by The Points Guy.
