The Heat and the Shine

UFC 173 tickets went on sale today and they are still available.  Very available.  The only sold out sections are the cheapest ones; though you can still get those $75 tickets on StubHub if you're willing to pay $125. It's odd to look at the MGM Grand Garden Arena seating map and see so many tickets available.   Floor seats at $750 are there, though the celebrity section perpendicular to press row is almost sold out.  Many of the straight-on escalated seats that sell for $750, $400 or $200 are gone, too.  And of course the cheapest lower level tickets ($200 per seat for the last few rows on the corners and ends) are mostly sold because those, the nosebleeds and cageside are where the ticket brokers make their money.  The rest of the seating chart is a sea of little blue dots waiting to be purchased. On paper, UFC 173 is a solid card.  It has a championship match.  It has a semi-main event featuring fighters ranked numbers one and five.  It has Daniel Cormier on his march t

Dave Scholler , UFC's head flack (technically Director of Communications, but I view the ol' Variety-style term "flack" for PR people with some fondness) took me to task a bit on Twitter recently because I wrote that UFC scaled the pricing too high for the UFC pay-per-view in Milwaukee on August 31.  Dave correctly pointed out that tickets had yet to go on sale to the general public, so my criticism was unfair.  My point was that anyone who wanted to but a UFC Fight Club membership for about $80 USD could gain the right to buy tickets, so essentially the event was on sale with an extra $80 tax added to each ticket order. Tickets to the August 31 UFC pay-per-view in Milwaukee are on sale now, and sales are meager thus far.  The Ticketmaster arena map shows that the cheap seats on both the upper level ($70 plus fees) and lower level ($150 plus fees) sold pretty well.  The best ringside seats ($400 plus fees) have also sold.  The problem is that the other sixty perce