How I got an top athletics ticket last night (and you can, too)

If this page had a sound effect, it would be the sound of a million computers destroying a million windows

I want to share this, because I'd tickets to go to the people who want them most and not just the ones who happen to get lucky.  It does take a bit of time and effort, but it can work.  I first tried it late last night, and almost immediately scored a category C (under £100) ticket for tonight's athletics finals, one of the sessions I wanted to see most out of the entire games.

All credit has to go to a guy called Ben Marsh who wrote the site I'm about to link to.


It's basically a case of technological advantage. In the hunt for games tickets this site - http://checker.benmarshinteractive.com/ - was my first friend. You give it five sessions to look for, and it scans the LOCOG site every minute and lets you know when that changes. That was brilliant for a while back in July, but then the whole internet jumped on the bandwagon and suddenly the competitive advantage was gone. The problem was that you'd find out about tickets and go there, but have to log in and do the silly security capture thing, and in that time they were gone again. SO...

What you need is a way to stay logged into the site, rather than getting timed out after ten minutes of inactivity. Ben's site recommended installing a firefox add-on called 'Check4Change'. That lets you select a bit of text on a page and refresh the whole page on a regular basis. If that text has changed, you get an alert. That part's not so important right now - BUT to check it it refreshes the site.  That tells the site you're still active, so you never have to log in or enter a security phrase.

If you make an order (any order, can be one ticket for a football match if that's all that's onsale) and when you get taken to the 'cart' page, select some of the text (again, doesn't matter what) and ask it to Check4Change (once the add-on's installed, you just select text and right click it, the check4change option will be there) every five minutes. In effect, you're placing an order every five minutes (not buying anything at that stage) so you're always logged in. Result.

Now the next bit is even cleverer. On Ben's ticket checker site (the link above) when you add a session to the list that's being checked you get a link to the event's page on the ticket website.  If there are none on sale, the 'Session ticket limit' there reads 0. So if you do that in a new tab (keeping the one that's logging you in all the time open) and select the '0', Check4Change will tell you as soon as that becomes '4'. I have that refreshing every 15 seconds.

So I get an alert within 15 seconds of tickets becoming available, and I'm already logged in. All I have to do it get there and hope they're not the crazily expensive ones. As I say, I did all this for the first time late last night and had a result on that athletics within half an hour. Now I'm checking the 100m final session, the last night in the stadium and one of the cycling ones.

If anyone reading abut this is concerned about the legitimacy of some of this stuff, LOCOG has confirmed that it's fine with the tracker page, and Check4Change isn't doing anything you couldn't do yourself with the F5 key. It's all totally above board. I can't guarantee it'll keep working this well, but it might for a bit. I got all this originally via twitter from #2012tweeps and a guy called @volshy, if that's any use to the twitterate amongst you. The Check4Change info and some other good tips are on the bottom of the tracker page (again, http://checker.benmarshinteractive.com/).

Good luck to all of you who haven't given up on the ticket hunt.  And if you do manage to bag a pair of £50 tickets for the 100m final, I make an excellent date...

[I've been told that Check4Change doesn't work as well with some macs.  This has been recommended to me as an alternative.  http://agriffindesign.com/downloads/autorefresh/]

To read about my night at the stadium, take a look here!  Or for more Olympic news and features, including an interview with one of our medal chasers, see what's new today.

Five Rings - 2/8

Blue - Eight badminton players have been sent home from the games after intentionally trying to lose games late in pool play in order to gain an apparently easier draw later in the tournament.  The punishment is very severe given the fact that there was no rule expressly outlawing such a strategy.  However, the athlete's oath taken on behalf of all competitors at the opening ceremony promises to compete '...in the true spirit of sportsmanship, for the glory of sport and the honor of our teams'. I don't think there's any question that those players were ignoring that oath, and as such don't really understand what it is to be Olympians.

Black -

Red - Tickets have been the biggest source of complaints about the whole London Games, I think.  First it was the ballot, where some people ended up with more tickets than they knew what to do with and most were left frustrated.  Then the unused tickets and empty seats which have blighted the past two Summer Olympics struck London.  Now there are tiny releases of spare seats which are triggering electronic bunfights and in practical terms mean a 25 minute wait to find that the seats you requested are no longer available, during which time all your second, third, fourth and seventeenth choices have gone too.  I spent a fruitless hour tilting at windmills tonight, not for the first time.

Gold - I'm still angry about the hidden Olympic flame.  Seb Coe has been very defensive when questioned, saying that "not a tourist attraction" and that LOCOG is following the example of the London games in 1948, when it was also kept inside the athletics stadium.  Just a thought, Lord Coe, but maybe the reason that was last done in 1948 is that someone had a better idea?  At that point scaffolding was probably rationed, or rooftop cauldrons of flame judged a risk for bombing raids.  Seb, you've misjudged the mood badly on this one.

Green - All home champions are to be commemorated in special edition stamps by the Royal Mail.  The Glover and Stanning one gets there faster than any of it's competitors, and the Bradley Wiggins stamp is equally valid in France.

Five Rings 31/7

Blue - The Egyptian I know affectionately as Ramases, but whose fans call Alaaeldin Abouelkassem (presumably not in particularly snappy chants) took a fairytale silver in the men's individual foil event tonight.

Watching him this morning I had no clue that he was just 21 years old, that he had come from being such a completely unknown quantity in just months, or that his goal in 2011 was simply to qualify for the games.  I didn't even know that he was becoming the first African ever to reach an Olympic fencing semi final.  All I knew was that I watched him beat the four time world champion Peter Joppich of Germany and then World Number 1 Andrea Cassara of Italy was that he was pure bloody box office.  The guy celebrates like Goran Ivanesevic did the year he won Wimbledon.  A real star in the making and it should go without saying my hope for gold in 2016.

Black - First it was Bill Simmonds at ESPN, then Barbara Surk and Nick Toomey for Yahoo!, now Ben Dirs at the BBC has a piece on how handball is the unexpected star of these games.  I was so ahead of this trend.

Red - 

Gold - Returned tickets are being made available for sale at many Olympic venues.  In a system similar to that used at Wimbledon, spectators who leave events early are being asked to hand in their tickets, which can then be re-sold for just £5 (adults) and £1 (children).  Availability is obviously very varied, but the BBC reported today that 283 handball tickets were released in this way on Saturday.

Green - Almost every Olympic venue is surrounded by billboards in what can only be described as shocking pink.  Almost the only one to escape the fate is the Aquatics Centre, which has blue hoardings.  What did they have to do to enjoy that distinction?

Czech out these tickets!

For those still hunting tickets... the Wall Street Journal provides this tip-off on a new opportunity to get hold of some great ones!

"On the official Olympics ticketing website, there are no available tickets for tennis, and there haven’t been on any of my repeated checks over the last few months. Same for track and field and swimming and diving, save the odd ticket a buyer is reselling, usually for 300 pounds ($473) or more. 

But at the Czech House, [52 Upper Street, Islington] the Czech delegation’s temporary headquarters in a conference center about four miles from Olympic Park, there were plenty of tickets available for sale Friday. I bought tickets for badminton and tennis, two racket sports that had proved elusive. Also available: diving tickets for Monday and the next few days, plus track-and-field tickets for the second week of the Games."

The full article, explaining why some national committees still find themselves with the spare tickets which have led to the controversial banks of empty seats at some events, can be found at http://blogs.wsj.com/dailyfix/2012/07/27/need-olympic-tickets-try-czech-delegation/.

I gather that the French delegation are also doing the same from their temporary headquarters in Old Billingsgate.

Let me know if you find anything good!