The suffering to buy (or not) UFC Rio/134 tickets

Dentist and black belt Rodrigo Lima, a resident of Espirito Santos, and lawyer José Brito, from Rio, experienced opposite emotions late Friday night.

The fight to purchase one of the 16,000 UFC Rio tickets was unfolding similarly for both of them, to tell the truth. But… “I tried desperately to buy a ticket; I used two laptops at the same time but the site was terribly slow. If anyone knows someone who wants to sell theirs, help me out,” said the dentist Rodrigo via email.

Now José, a lawyer, struck gold. “I opened a ton of browser windows and started attempting to make the purchase at several prices but always came up with an error, even in putting in my CPF (equivalent to social security number). I’d already accepted defeat, until I had the surprise of seeing that Ingresso.com had charged my account for a 275-real ticket. It happened that it didn’t send out my confirmation, it only came this morning,” said the overjoyed white belt, stoked.

For UFC 129 in Toronto, newspaper and website classifieds turned out to be the best channel for picking up sold-out tickets. There, at least, a lot of the tickets were sold without major hikes to the cost – they were fans who decided not to or wouldn’t be able to go, not looking to profit from it. Here, unfortunately, it will be hard to get around resorting to scalpers, for anyone dreaming of watching UFC 134 live.