7 ms·

Why You Can’t Get a Ticket to the NBA Finals

40 points by pappyo 10y ago

vlucas 10y ago
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 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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
  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 10y ago
  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'
zippergz 10y ago
Yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11833484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11833484
- pappyo 10y ago
  Here's what I don't get. In previous versions of HN, my submission would be directed to the original. Why doesn't that happen any more?
guelo 10y ago
A more accurate title would be something like "Why you can't get good tickets for popular events via the official websites."
aianus 10y ago
What's wrong with blindly auctioning off all of the tickets? That way more tickets will be sold, the artist can't be accused of being greedy, there won't be much profit in the resale market, and everyone who attends the show will have paid an amount they thought was reasonable during the bidding process.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- danbruc 10y ago
  Because if the supply of tickets is lower than the demand, which it obviously is, tickets will essentially only go to the people able to spend the most money on them.
  - karzeem 10y ago
    That's how almost all goods in the world are allocated. Is a lottery more fair?
    - danbruc 10y ago
      If the demand for hamburgers exceeds the supply, then the market will hopefully do its thing and supply more hamburgers. On the other hand supplying a few more copies of your favorite band or sports team is not going to happen any time soon. Whether a lottery would be more fair depends on your point of few. Many would certainly say no because the artist or sports team would make less money than they could and people willing to pay a lot of money to get tickets would lose their ability to do so. Others like me would consider it more fair, it is a kind of failure of the free market and favors rich people just because they are rich. I would argue that one should actually favor the poorer people because being able to go to a concert or game for a reasonable price may add lot more value in terms of quality of life for them as compared to rich people already having access to all kinds of niceties.
      - karzeem 10y ago
mmastrac 10y ago
It feels like the ticketing process in general is broken. There's too much demand for events, making the entire market dysfunctional. Why don't we 1) make tickets non-transferrable (but refundable), 2) start pricing half the tickets as what the person will pay via auction and the other half as a fixed-price lottery? I'm not aware of many other ways to make things fair when demand outstrips supply so much.
- mifreewil 10y ago
  > 1) make tickets non-transferrable (but refundable) This is apparently what Louis CK is doing for his latest tour. I ordered tickets and I have to pick them up from the box office with ID starting 1 hour before show starts. Or I can request a refund.
  - aaronmiler 10y ago
    Dave Chappelle did something similar when he came through Portland. If your name wasn't on the ticket, you got turned away at the door. People who paid $300+ for second hand tickets weren't allowed in
- chrisseaton 10y ago
  I can't relate to any of the arguments in this thread! Why does it need to be fair? It's a private business putting on an event that nobody needs to go to except as a luxury entertainment. It's not access to food and water. We don't expect that other limited luxuries should be available to everyone, so why concerts and sport events? Surely tickets going to the people who'll pay the most is fair?
  - bgilroy26 10y ago
    Selling some at a lottery provides a market for people who would be priced out very early along the curve. If you want to avoid a Hunger Games situation where only the rich and famous enjoy your product (the NBA and many musicians care about this) that sort of person needs to be provided for
admn2 10y ago
Unrelated: Can't tell how I feel about Medium.com as a CMS compared to old Grantland. Reads great, but feels like standalone (could just be me.)
- kelukelugames 10y ago
  The customization looks ugly. Hopefully Medium will add more flexibility or become plug and play like Disqus.
gratalis 10y ago
Good analysis that makes me slightly less upset about the difficulty of gaining entrance into the Western States 100. The WSER event organizers implement this article's primary recommendations: transparency and non-transferability despite the huge supply and demand disparity and market forces driving their automatic entry vs. lottery process: http://www.wser.org/entry-process/ http://www.wser.org/entry-process/
chinathrow 10y ago
> A couple of my friends are scalpers. You have bad friends. Edit: Aren't scalpers viewed as the scum? Why the downvotes?
- dang 10y ago
  Probably because it wasn't substantive. There's also something uncivil about reducing a complex thing like lutefisk's comment to the most-easily-denounced bit, then denouncing it. It shuts down conversation instead of taking it in an interesting direction. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11837077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11837077 and marked it off-topic.
  - chinathrow 10y ago
    Thank you
syphilis2 10y ago
A few years ago Louis CK started selling tickets for his shows exclusively from his website. His post announcing the process is worth a read. I bought tickets for that show from him and the process was as simple as he describes it. https://louisck.net/news/im-going-on-the-road https://louisck.net/news/im-going-on-the-road
- baddox 10y ago
  He certainly doesn't still exclusively do that. Tickets for his current tour are sold through Ticketmaster.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - syphilis2 10y ago
    I was not aware, but this is true. I looked through his latest tour and ticket prices vary, tickets are sold from various ticket outlets, and (depending on the outlet) additional fees may inflate prices. It seems like the only tenet that remains is that about ticket resale. https://louisck.net/tour-dates https://louisck.net/tour-dates : 'Regarding ticket resale: we take great efforts and have many methods of finding out what inventory is being sold on "broker" sites like Stubhub and Vivid Seats and immediately invalidating those tickets.'
Glyptodon 10y ago
Nontransferable tickets seem terrible, mostly because they screw regular people as much as "devious resellers." Would no longer be possible to gift tickets or recover costs in the case of an unexpected cancellation. I'm more curious why they have to be sold on a FCFS basis rather than an auction or via random selection.
- burkaman 10y ago
  If you just make them refundable then only the resellers get screwed.
geodel 10y ago
I think this is like asking for 'Right to redressal for hurt feelings'. Simple economic logic dictates that those who pay highest for music/sporting events get privilege to watch that live. These fans seems to be asking for Right to watch live. What if less popular artists/sports teams ask for Right to Audience? I think government should start looking into that also after all there must be lots of mediocre artists/sports persons/chefs etc looking for patrons.
- wlesieutre 10y ago
  That is one solution for how to distribute a good that's available in limited quantities. It's not the only solution, or necessarily the "best" solution for any given circumstance. Other examples include "Who's willing to wait in a 15 minute line for the water fountain," "Enter a lottery for the limited number of season football tickets," and "Only people with an even numbered license plate can buy gas today." I think there are longer-term factors for the NBA here. If your fans can't get reasonably priced tickets to any of the games they're excited about because of scalping, some percent of them are going to get fed up and do something else with their lives. The NBA gets long term value out of fans being able to connect with their brand at the prices that the NBA is setting, but scalpers are scraping up the benefits from both sides and pocketing it. NBA doesn't get the money that they could have earned by charging higher prices, and fans don't have a shot at affordable access to events.

40 points by pappyo 10y ago

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 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 10y ago
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 10y ago
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 10y ago
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'

zippergz 10y ago

Yesterday: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11833484 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11833484

pappyo 10y ago
Here's what I don't get. In previous versions of HN, my submission would be directed to the original. Why doesn't that happen any more?

guelo 10y ago

A more accurate title would be something like "Why you can't get good tickets for popular events via the official websites."

aianus 10y ago

What's wrong with blindly auctioning off all of the tickets? That way more tickets will be sold, the artist can't be accused of being greedy, there won't be much profit in the resale market, and everyone who attends the show will have paid an amount they thought was reasonable during the bidding process.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
danbruc 10y ago
Because if the supply of tickets is lower than the demand, which it obviously is, tickets will essentially only go to the people able to spend the most money on them.
- karzeem 10y ago
  That's how almost all goods in the world are allocated. Is a lottery more fair?
  - danbruc 10y ago
    If the demand for hamburgers exceeds the supply, then the market will hopefully do its thing and supply more hamburgers. On the other hand supplying a few more copies of your favorite band or sports team is not going to happen any time soon. Whether a lottery would be more fair depends on your point of few. Many would certainly say no because the artist or sports team would make less money than they could and people willing to pay a lot of money to get tickets would lose their ability to do so. Others like me would consider it more fair, it is a kind of failure of the free market and favors rich people just because they are rich. I would argue that one should actually favor the poorer people because being able to go to a concert or game for a reasonable price may add lot more value in terms of quality of life for them as compared to rich people already having access to all kinds of niceties.
    - karzeem 10y ago

mmastrac 10y ago

It feels like the ticketing process in general is broken. There's too much demand for events, making the entire market dysfunctional. Why don't we 1) make tickets non-transferrable (but refundable), 2) start pricing half the tickets as what the person will pay via auction and the other half as a fixed-price lottery? I'm not aware of many other ways to make things fair when demand outstrips supply so much.

mifreewil 10y ago
> 1) make tickets non-transferrable (but refundable) This is apparently what Louis CK is doing for his latest tour. I ordered tickets and I have to pick them up from the box office with ID starting 1 hour before show starts. Or I can request a refund.
- aaronmiler 10y ago
  Dave Chappelle did something similar when he came through Portland. If your name wasn't on the ticket, you got turned away at the door. People who paid $300+ for second hand tickets weren't allowed in
chrisseaton 10y ago
I can't relate to any of the arguments in this thread! Why does it need to be fair? It's a private business putting on an event that nobody needs to go to except as a luxury entertainment. It's not access to food and water. We don't expect that other limited luxuries should be available to everyone, so why concerts and sport events? Surely tickets going to the people who'll pay the most is fair?
- bgilroy26 10y ago
  Selling some at a lottery provides a market for people who would be priced out very early along the curve. If you want to avoid a Hunger Games situation where only the rich and famous enjoy your product (the NBA and many musicians care about this) that sort of person needs to be provided for

admn2 10y ago

Unrelated: Can't tell how I feel about Medium.com as a CMS compared to old Grantland. Reads great, but feels like standalone (could just be me.)

kelukelugames 10y ago
The customization looks ugly. Hopefully Medium will add more flexibility or become plug and play like Disqus.

gratalis 10y ago

Good analysis that makes me slightly less upset about the difficulty of gaining entrance into the Western States 100. The WSER event organizers implement this article's primary recommendations: transparency and non-transferability despite the huge supply and demand disparity and market forces driving their automatic entry vs. lottery process: http://www.wser.org/entry-process/ http://www.wser.org/entry-process/

chinathrow 10y ago

> A couple of my friends are scalpers. You have bad friends. Edit: Aren't scalpers viewed as the scum? Why the downvotes?

dang 10y ago
Probably because it wasn't substantive. There's also something uncivil about reducing a complex thing like lutefisk's comment to the most-easily-denounced bit, then denouncing it. It shuts down conversation instead of taking it in an interesting direction. We detached this comment from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11837077 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11837077 and marked it off-topic.
- chinathrow 10y ago
  Thank you

syphilis2 10y ago

A few years ago Louis CK started selling tickets for his shows exclusively from his website. His post announcing the process is worth a read. I bought tickets for that show from him and the process was as simple as he describes it. https://louisck.net/news/im-going-on-the-road https://louisck.net/news/im-going-on-the-road

baddox 10y ago
He certainly doesn't still exclusively do that. Tickets for his current tour are sold through Ticketmaster.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- syphilis2 10y ago
  I was not aware, but this is true. I looked through his latest tour and ticket prices vary, tickets are sold from various ticket outlets, and (depending on the outlet) additional fees may inflate prices. It seems like the only tenet that remains is that about ticket resale. https://louisck.net/tour-dates https://louisck.net/tour-dates : 'Regarding ticket resale: we take great efforts and have many methods of finding out what inventory is being sold on "broker" sites like Stubhub and Vivid Seats and immediately invalidating those tickets.'

Glyptodon 10y ago

Nontransferable tickets seem terrible, mostly because they screw regular people as much as "devious resellers." Would no longer be possible to gift tickets or recover costs in the case of an unexpected cancellation. I'm more curious why they have to be sold on a FCFS basis rather than an auction or via random selection.

burkaman 10y ago
If you just make them refundable then only the resellers get screwed.

geodel 10y ago

I think this is like asking for 'Right to redressal for hurt feelings'. Simple economic logic dictates that those who pay highest for music/sporting events get privilege to watch that live. These fans seems to be asking for Right to watch live. What if less popular artists/sports teams ask for Right to Audience? I think government should start looking into that also after all there must be lots of mediocre artists/sports persons/chefs etc looking for patrons.

wlesieutre 10y ago
That is one solution for how to distribute a good that's available in limited quantities. It's not the only solution, or necessarily the "best" solution for any given circumstance. Other examples include "Who's willing to wait in a 15 minute line for the water fountain," "Enter a lottery for the limited number of season football tickets," and "Only people with an even numbered license plate can buy gas today." I think there are longer-term factors for the NBA here. If your fans can't get reasonably priced tickets to any of the games they're excited about because of scalping, some percent of them are going to get fed up and do something else with their lives. The NBA gets long term value out of fans being able to connect with their brand at the prices that the NBA is setting, but scalpers are scraping up the benefits from both sides and pocketing it. NBA doesn't get the money that they could have earned by charging higher prices, and fans don't have a shot at affordable access to events.