Doesn't work. Here in Toronto the ticket agents limit sales to 4 per buyer, so the scalpers pay people to line up and buy the limit. I did that a couple of times in my younger days- spent the night waiting for the agency to open, bought four Paul Simon tickets and made $100. There were about two hundred people in line and only one person was actually planning to attend the show.
Wow. That’s not cool. I had no idea they went to such lengths.
I think ("guess" would be a better word) the key to scalping is to understand that the asset becomes virtually worthless at a set time. The scalper may be sitting in the catbird seat for a while, but if he doesn't move product he ends up with expensive cardboard in his hands.
I am not good at all at poker. But lots of life is a poker game, I think.
I also wondered is there was a workable analogy between scalpers and traders on the NYSE floor. Traders are said to make an orderly market. I guess that means they help sort out the people who really really want to won XYZ or a ticket to the Dylan concert from those who don't. I don't know.
It’s done that way on the internet as well. People are paid by these scalpers to keep on clicking till they buy tickets. Some of these “brokers” have special software that allows them to hack into the website and buy up tickets ahead of the ordinary chump. Even if the tickets are limited to 4 per person — if you have a hundred people going in and buying up 4 tickets each or whatever, you have 400 tickets you can sell for some really inflated prices.
And believe me, people will pay big bucks particularly for major artists, shows and games. Once I got the bright idea of seeing the Rolling Stones and Dave Matthews Band in concert - the ticket sales were already over, so I wanted to see what was available via these “brokers.” The CHEAPEST seat was $400. The best seats cost thousands.
As long as these “brokers” have a market, that is, chumps wililng to pay big bucks, they will always be around.
The ticket agents in Toronto aren’t as clean as you’d like to believe but they also aren’t really the main part of the probelm. Their role is mostly just to efficiently distribute the tickets and provide a third party accounting for the ticket sales. It’s the promoters that have the most power as they are the ones who can get around the block purchase limits, they are actually the ones that set them in the first place since it is usually part of the performance contract.
If you really want to see the scalping industry in action, go down to a concert club like the Guvernment before a concert and observe the street action. The promoter at the club usually has a couple of scalpers working the crowd on sold out shows. They will also actually strong arm anyone else trying to scalp on “their” turf.