Introducing SeatGeek tickets

Back in early September, I launched the "Time to Step Up" season preview series and introduced the Dark Blue Jacket Shop as a means to leverage this blog to provide greater service to you, the Columbus Blue Jackets fans, in the wake of the incredibly successful CannonFest.  It may seem strange and somewhat counter-cultural to some to take a little hobby blog like this and try to make it something more.  You can amplify those feelings when you learn that I have not made dime one since starting it.  However, if you had seen the incredible CBJ fan community come together at CannonFest as it did, you would have been moved to become more enthusiastically involved, too!

As a result, I would like to think that this blog hosted one of the more thorough season previews seen anywhere in the hockey blogosphere.  In addition, click any of the categories at the top of the page, and you'll find yourself wading through an incredible collection of CBJ merchandise, among the most thorough on the web.

One thing that I've wanted to do since embarking on this path, however, is close the loop and integrate the blog into the actual game-watching experience.  I recently learned about a service that will help the DBJ blog do just that: SeatGeek.

SeatGeek is an aggregator of vendors in the secondary ticket market.  You know, the ticket brokers who can get you tickets to sold out events.  These guys also buy tickets at very low prices and sell at...low prices.  Don't ask me how they do this, because I don't know.  (I did use a secondary service in the preseason, however, and grabbed two tickets - one for me, and one for the Dark Blue Toddler - to the CBJ-Atlanta preseason game for $12 for the pair...so I'm now a fan of these services.)

Find more great tickets - even for sold out events!

This particular service brings together the StubHub, Vivid Seats, TicketNetwork Razorgator, TicketsNow and other similar networks on one site to give you one-stop shopping of a huge swath of the secondary ticket market.  You can compare the four services against the seating chart at Nationwide Arena (or any other venue, as SeatGeek also lists tickets for MLB, NFL, NBA, concerts and theater performances) to get your ideal combination of price and location.  Pretty sweet.

Beyond that, however, is the really cool part.  You see, this new service is amassing the ticket price data using a patent-pending prediction formula that will eventually forecast the ticket prices over the days ahead and offer you guidance on when to buy.  SeatGeek claims 80-85% accuracy on their predictions.  Imagine, SeatGeek telling you to wait on buying tickets because its trend analysis suggests that prices will drop.  Or, on the other hand, it might advise you to buy now as ticket prices are spiking.  I've looked around on SeatGeek's site, and the forecasting is already up and running for some teams and sports.  It'll eventually come to the Blue Jackets games, and that will be GREAT for you.

I hope you enjoy this new aspect of the Dark Blue Jacket blog, which will be posted on every page of this site as long as SeatGeek lets me do so.  Which reminds me: In the interest of openness, you should know that I have an arrangement with SeatGeek that allows me to post their widget on my site.  I supposedly could someday get some compensation from SeatGeek, but I'll look forward to that with the same rapt anticipation that I'm looking forward to that first check from Amazon or Google.  The important thing to me is that we've got something here that could be very useful to CBJ fans far and wide.

Carry The Flag!