Tips To Get The Most Out Of The 2010 Yankees Individual Game Ticket Sale

Written by Ross Sheingold | 19 March 2010

Fans of the 29 other MLB teams have had their chance, now its time for Yankees fans to fire up their computers, hammer their F5 key and snatch up individual tickets for 2010 home games at Yankee Stadium.  Three hours from now, ticketmaster.com will magically refresh and a bevy of ticket options will be at your fingertips.  Here are some tips on how to beat the bots and make sure that you don't leave the sale disappointed.

1. Lower your expectations. Unless you have a ridiculously fast internet connection with multiple browsers open (and four arms), you are unlikely to score inexpensive tickets to multiple premium games. Decide on the one game you can't stand to miss and get your F5 key ready.
2. Know your inventory and target specific seat categories. Gone are the days that seats throughout the stadium are ripe for the picking when tickets go on sale to the public.  Between season ticket sales and presales, the Yankees have already sold well over 3 million tickets for the 2010 season.  Conveniently, with the advance of websites such as Fansnap and Stubhub, you can now accurately forecast which sections of the stadium have yet to be put on sale.  For example, if you click over to Fansnap's map of opening day tickets, you can see the sections without flags don't have any tickets for sale.  This is a strong indicator that the Yankees have yet to release tickets in those sections. You can also scroll over different sections and if you only see 8 tickets for sale, it is very likely that the Yankees have more tickets to release in that section.
3. Prepare your Ticketmaster.com account. Ticketmaster has started to allow for more time on each step of the ticket purchasing process, but it is still a race to beat the clock if you are a slow typer.  Before the sale, make sure you are logged into Ticketmaster.com, and if you feel comfortable, load your credit card information onto your profile.  This will give you peace of mind when the clock strikes noon.
4. Work off of a cheat sheet. For some reason, Ticketmaster doesn't use a "breadcrumb" linking system that allows you to easily click back to a search results page.  If you attempt to get tickets to a game and it is sold out, you are forced to start your search over again.  Take the time now to create a document with a list of games that you're interested in and the direct link to that sale page.  It will prove invaluable.
5. Don't sweat the CAPTCHA. Most people's worst Ticketmaster nightmare is the "CAPTCHA." We've all had a situation where we can't quite make out one of the letters in those annoying, nonsensical phrases and it cost us tickets.  Here's a dirty little secret: you don't have to get the word exactly right.  The system is engineered to weed out computer programs, but it doesn't require an exact match. If you spell most of the phrase correctly, you'll move on to the next screen.  If you notice a minor typo, just keep going, rather than wasting time deleting the letters and re-typing them.  If you don't believe us, try it out on another event before the sale. You'll see.
6. Don't use the "best available" dropdown unless you have a LOT of money to burn. If only there was a "cheapest available" drop down. We'd be all over that. Unfortunately, there isn't, and if you choose "best available" for tickets at Yankee Stadium, you are going to end up with $1,000 Legend Suites. For 2010, it looks like Ticketmaster has split out premium seating options into separate URLs for each game, but there are still plenty of expensive seats on the regular sale page.  Feel free to use "best available" if money isn't an issue for you, but you have been warned!