OP bought one set of season tickets to their favorite baseball team, went to the games they wanted to see, and sold tickets to the games they didn’t want to attend to other fans for less than face value and (presumably) without the outrageous fees that you’d pay at Ticketmaster, et al.

Every casual season ticket holder does this, but most of us don’t systematize it - we just send messages to our group chats, and if nobody wants the tickets for that game then the seats stay empty. There’s absolutely nothing scummy or untoward about OP’s approach.

Perhaps I'm mis-reading the plural here, but how many season tickets do you consider a "set"?

Given OP bragged about seeing "6-7 games for FREE", it implies a lot of profit was made on the rest of the re-sold tickets.

There's a big difference between being a season ticket holder and buying multiple season tickets for the purpose of reselling and subsidising your own ticket.

> Scalping tickets designed to be heavily discounted for fans.

You’re making a very strong assumption here.

Teams are selling at a bulk discount, that’s it. There’s nothing to suggest that they are doing it to be benevolent.

it's just arbitrage.

scalping tickets isn't morally distinct from any other form of "buy low, sell high."

I see your point. I'm not sure you're objectively wrong. But it feels wrong. :)

Where there is sufficient demand for things to sell out to people who want the product, but are unable to get it because someone has used a bot to scoop them up at superhuman speeds... that doesn't feel exactly like the moral equivalent of other forms of arbitrage.

_Especially_ when the sellers themselves would prefer that not happen. The bands want the tickets to go to the fans at no higher than the price the venue sets. Sony wants more gamers to have PS5s at the price they set.

It feels like the marketplace would function perfectly fine, and the true seller and the final buyer want it to work one way, but third party interlopers are taking advantage of other aspects of the scale and technological basis of our marketplace.

Market makers provide value; scalpers rent seek. I think that's a valid moral distinction.

I can see where you're coming from, but I have pretty bad news, which is that the last line just doesn't match reality, at least not in the United States. It might make sense in theory, but it just isn't true:

> Market makers provide value; scalpers rent seek.

In the United States, event tickets are functionally a monopoly. In practice, Ticketmaster/Live Nation is a rent-seeking market maker which crushes small events and blocks value from being created.

Here's a deep dive on that, just under 20 minutes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_Y7uqqEFnY

This doesn't mean that scalpers can't also be rent-seekers, but given that scalpers are highly competitive and Ticketmaster is a monopoly, I think the scalpers aren't in a position to seek rent.

This part has a similar flaw:

> someone has used a bot to scoop them up at superhuman speeds... that doesn't feel exactly like the moral equivalent of other forms of arbitrage.

High-speed trading is all about bots and arbitrage. This isn't the first time those two things have been combined. There are corners of New York where they're practically synonymous.

This one has factual issues also:

> The bands want the tickets to go to the fans at no higher than the price the venue sets.

It's only true of _some_ bands. There's evidence (in that deep dive video) that Justin Bieber has probably scalped tickets to his own shows, at scale.

I'm not saying that if Justin Bieber does it, it automatically can't be scummy. That seems like a very very hard argument to make. I'm a musician and I would not want to have that kind of relationship with my fans (if I had any, beyond a few repeat listeners on Spotify).

I'm just saying, there's a lot in this comment which makes intuitive sense but doesn't actually line up with the reality of the situation.