[vlucas]

Well this explains a lot.

I recently bought NBA tickets to Game 3 of the Western Conference Finals (Oklahoma City Thunder vs. Golden State Warriors), and I was absolutely pissed off at the whole process.

I went on a small Twitter rampage to vent about it, with a picture that shows NO TICKETS available LITERALLY THE SECOND they went "on sale" (10AM Thursday May 19, 2016), and then beside it another screenshot of ALMOST 1,300 TICKETS FOR RESALE at the exact same time.

https://twitter.com/vlucas/status/733315798068953089

I learned the system was rigged against me the hard way, and it totally sucked. It was painfully obvious that all the tickets were sold out well before the game, and that a whole lot of scalpers were making lots of money on reselling tickets that were not fans, and never had any intention of going to the game in the first place. The kicker is that the system actually seemed designed intentionally for this to happen, screwing the actual fans in the process.

[lutefisk]

That's pretty intentional. A venue really doesn't care how many people go, they care that the show gets "sold out".

A couple of my friends are scalpers. They said there's a limit of 8 tickets for most shows per address, but if you walk in with thousands of dollars in cash that limit goes away. Online it's a little different since you need to put your address in for your credit card, but there's plenty of ways to get multiple addresses with your name for credit cards.

They make more than me as a software engineer, but they can easily lose thousands if a show doesn't pan out. They follow tours across the US and hope they find "the one" that makes them rich.

[Implicated]

I recently experienced the same scenario with comedy show tickets, Dave Chappele did a few last min shows in Portland and getting tickets through the sales site was absolutely impossible.

Not only were they sold out within seconds, I also got the impression the process was designed to make sure anyone with an automated process would "win". Being a developer and knowing how people would use a system like theirs, it blew my mind they took basically no precautions to stop automated buyers from buying everything immediately.

Someone is making lots of money.

[justifier]

i was able to see an on broadway, original cast, performance of book of mormon.. for free

my sister had a friend from college who grew up on the upper east side who in turn had a friend from childhood who 'invests' ~10,000$ every year by buying tickets to broadway shows and reselling them

when we went looking four tickets were offered to us for free because 'i've made 4000x on this show already'