Bowled over
I really didn’t even intend to try and get Ice Bowl tickets when I woke up this morning. I figured with 75,000 seats the game wouldn’t sell out for quite some time. Then I said to myself, well, if I’m planning on going, I may as well try and get the best tickets possible. So around 9:00am, I got my browser all set up to the Ticketmaster page and went off to a meeting. I came back to my PC around 9:58am and the site wasn’t up yet. I hit refresh, nothing. Refresh, nothing. Refresh, bingo! I picked 8 tickets at the $60 price level… nothing available. What? Can’t be. Tickets just went on sale! Tried it again… same thing. Picked a different price level… no tickets available. Tried less tickets, still nothing. It was not even ten after 10 when I tried for tickets at any price level, only to be greeted by the same message. At this point, I just assumed the system had a glitch and wasn’t selling tickets yet. There was no message saying they were sold out, just the same message over and over again. I kept trying for 45 minutes, until BFLOBlog, and then the Sabres, announced that all the tickets “in the Ticketmaster system” had sold out.
I honestly couldn’t believe it. I was in that system from minute 0 and not once did it present me with any option to purchase any number of tickets at any price level. Ok, so it was only 41,000 tickets instead of the full 75,000, but still. That many tickets sold in that little time? I find it hard to believe there wasn’t some glitch in the system.
Of course the rumors abound – large blocks of tickets were set aside for Maple Leafs and Blue Jays (WTF?) season ticket holders, scalpers scooped up mass quantities of tickets, whatever. Some people are certainly trying to cash in quickly, as a pair of $39 seats is up for $500 on eBay. I’m certainly not the type to pay over 6x the face value of a pair of hockey tickets, so unless a whole lot more tickets are suddenly released for sale, we’ll be hosting our first New Year’s Eve sleepover party, to be capped off by the Ice Bowl on the big screen.
I tried for two $110 tickets right at 10, no luck. Then I tried “best available” and got 2 $90 tix. I tried for a couple of more after that to no avail. I looked at ebay and was tempted to sell them, but my desire to go to the game is greater.