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.