I bought three Phillies tickets for a total of $2 from scalpers last year, and I regularly went to games for half of face value, so it is possible to take advantage of the ticket brokers. For the hard-to-get games, I have a friend who runs a company's IT department. He has access to so many computers that he can have 9000 or so Virtual Waiting Room windows open at once. He gets me bleacher tickets for the games I want (last year in groups of 6), and I repay him by giving him one ticket for each game. It works out to a $30-$40 premium for each game that way, but it's worth it to me, and he deserves some sort of compensation since he has to take the day off to buy tickets for me. It's really crazy how people don't realize how easy it is to get tickets for cheap with brokers. Brokers make all their money 1-5 hours before the game. By that point, even with 20-30 tickets left to sell, they've already made their intended profit. They then sell the rest of the tickets close to face if possible, but if you negotiate they will go way under face value. Even if they get $1 for the ticket, they are increasing their overall profit by that much. I've gotten 100 level tickets to see Roger Clemens pitch in a night game for $5. My friend even got a ticket to the first Boston game by waiting til the Bottom of the first for $30. My other friend and I got up at 6am in February to ensure ourselves tickets to the game, but he ended up sitting right next to us for basically the same we paid months ago. Believe it or not, this same philosophy has gotten me great tickets at Bulls games and even a Bears game (Got 2 club box seats with $250 face value each for a grand total of $50). The key here is never think that you can't get tickets to a game.