September 12, 2015

LOTTERY TRAP

The Cubs are holding a "lottery" for 2015 playoff tickets.

The Cubs have a 99 percent chance of making the wild card play in game.

The Cubs have decided to have a lottery for post season tickets. The lottery page screen:

There are a couple points to be made:

1. Despite what the Cubs marketing department has said, the team did not sell enough season ticket packages to have a built in base for all the post-season tickets. The league and opposing team are given a large block of playoff tickets to give to player families, league staff and baseball national sponsors. It is more probable than not that the Cubs lost many season ticket holders this year because of three years of bad teams at high prices and the bleachers being closed for construction early in the season.

2. The lottery page is a blatant data mining operation. If it was a pure lottery, none of the questions is relevant for your chances to "win" the ability to purchase nose bleed seats at inflated prices. If the Cubs are trying to weed out the die hard fan from the scalper, then just open the ticket windows at 6 a.m. one morning and see the true die hards line up. The team has not announced how many tickets are actually available for each playoff game, so thousands of people may be signing up with no chance of getting a ticket. But in order to feed off the high expectations of the fan base, the team is milking their fans to get valuable data to use or re-sell on the secondary information market.