Playoff hockey is scheduled to start in Nashville on Thursday with the Predators playing the Colorado Avalanche, and tickets to a Predators playoff game are one of the hottest tickets in town, and they're not easy to get.
“Our season ticket holders had first opportunity to purchase playoff tickets for this Stanley Cup Playoff run,” Nat Harden, senior vice president of ticket sales for the Nashville Predators, said, adding that there are other ways to get tickets beyond already having them. “The best way for fans to be able to purchase tickets is to go to Ticketmaster and become a verified fan.”
A verified fan allows a Predators fan to get access to tickets that normal people aren't allowed to get.
“The reason why we’re doing this is to kind of block out the bots, make sure that real fans are receiving tickets and it’s the most fair and equitable way to do so," Harden said.
You can become a verified fan on Ticketmaster.com. Once you become a verified fan, then you have a chance to be sent an email the night prior to a game with a special access code. You can then use that code to purchase tickets the next morning, the day of the game, at 10 a.m.
100 tickets are being reserved in the upper bowl of Bridgestone Arena for verified fans to purchase day-of. They are $15 a piece, by far the cheapest ticket in the stadium.
The other option would be buying tickets from someone who already has them, but on the secondary market, there is always the chance that the tickets are counterfeit.
“As tickets have become in higher demand, there’s more ticket fraud out there, and if you’re purchasing a paper ticket or a PDF, it’s going to be a fraudulent ticket," Harden said, explaining that all Predators tickets have been moved to a mobile ticket format, so there should be no physical tickets available.
If you are going to purchase tickets on a secondary market, Harden suggests using the NHL Ticket Exchange through Ticketmaster. It is the only place to buy tickets that are guaranteed to be legitimate, as they are regulated by the NHL.
