I'd say just report what you think is low quality. The moderators in that section are definitely active, and they'd probably welcome reports in that section. I only see newbie reports there, and they aren't that often, so I'm wondering if it might be the same for higher ranked accounts.
It would take the same amount of effort to report the posts, than to self moderate it yourself. Might be even quicker reporting, since you don't have to go through, and delete every post referencing that, whereas the moderator will.
I agree that threads I opened could probably be turned to self-moderated (you named one but I have others also attracting spam) -- I don't mind moderating, though I might be accused of being too harsh, and could be biased to all the users I already know gamble (but that bias is good right?). It was just natural for me to NOT self-moderate to keep the thread censorship free but at this stage, I think the pro (less spam) is preferable to the con (possible censorship).
That doesn't really matter all that much, as it's a self moderated thread. If users don't like the way you're moderating a thread, they can open their own. Although, that does have its own set of problems, especially if we've got two almost identical threads, which are massing replies. Especially, if the spammers then post in both of them to get paid, which I suspect would be the case.