Wild West

Without a doubt, scalping tickets is one of the most developed activities in Russia.

On Friday, I went to a hockey match between CSKA and Khimki. I got there 15 minutes after the game had started and the box office was already closed. Therefore, I bought a ticket from a scalper and paid a 20% premium, i.e., 2 dollars more. No biggie, but the damn scalper sold me a seat among the Khimki fans! The CSKA defense was playing really badly that day, and CSKA lost 4 to 8 (great ROI: 1 dollar per goal!). However, I kind of feared that the CSKA fans would get upset and try to beat up the Khimki supporters (including me, since I was sitting near them) -- but everything went alright in the end.

On Saturday, I picked up tickets for the Tennis Kremlin Cup finals at a scalping office. The scalpers' website had an English version, but the phone attendants only spoke Russian when I called during the week. After three attempts, I managed to speak to the manager, who tried to sell me $250 tickets! I finally settled for $27 tickets + $3 comission. They didn't have tickets for the qualifying rounds though, so I went to the official box office at the Olympic Stadium after picking up my ticket for the finals. To my surprise, the ticket I bought from the scalper was still on sale for the original price at the stadium! By the way, tickets for the qualifiers were dirty cheap ($2), which is probably why the scalpers were not carrying them.

I had two experiences where I managed to avoid scalpers though:

1) For the CSKA-Arsenal Champions League match, the scalpers were only selling $100 tickets, so we had the driver of one of the expats call the stadium and find out how to buy tickets from the official box office. It was well worth it: we bought seats for just $45.

2) I bought orchestra seats to see the Bolshoi ballet on November 27th, when Livia will be here. I reserved them on the Bolshoi website and then picked them up at their box office... which was surrounded by scalpers trying to sell tickets for a 50% premium!

Note: the day I bought tickets fot the Kremlin Cup was the first time I'd forgotten to carry my passport with me; I was really afraid to get stopped by a cop and being scalped, but fortunately nothing happened. It was a beautiful evening, and I really wanted to take pictures at Red Square but I chickened out. I took some pics at Lubyanka square (the headquarters of the former KGB) and Detsky Mir (a huge toy store) though: