LAS VEGAS – The scalpers are out, and there’s no stopping them.
With just two days before the fight, even tickets to the closed circuit television are being peddled twice, thrice or even four times higher than their face value of $50.
Fight tickets, the highest at $1,000 off the selling booths, are being sold for as ridiculously high as $13,514 or easily more than half a million pesos.
The problem, it seems, is that some people are biting. When there’s the demand, there’s always the supply.
Bob Arum, the chief promoter, said all 17,000 to the MGM Grand Garden Arena have been sold as as early as five weeks ago.
Now that they’re out, in the black market, they don’t have any control over it.
Arum said he’d never seen anything like this in recent years as far as ticket sales are concerned. He said Thursday he has an idea of how it’s being done.
“The scalpers are out,” he said.
“And what some people do, apparently, and let’s say they’re big players, so they get two tickets from the casinos, and the tickets are a thousand dollars each.
“But they really want to gamble. So they go to a scalper and say ‘Look, you sell these tickets for $10,000 and we split the money. So, now it gives then extra money to gamble,” he said.
Or straight up, scalpers will offer the tickets to prospective buyers anywhere but near the venue. It’s easy money when you talk of a profit of over 500 percent.
A Filipino high-roller, who did not want to be identified, got eight tickets from his favorite casino here. But he’s not a scalper.
“I did not come here to sell. I came here to watch,” said the Filipino fight fan, who came with his friends and family, just for the fight.
And some time at the casino.