[Editor’s Note: As a follow-up to Dapper Dave Kamsler’s previous post about the Raiders game-day experience (or maybe as more of a prequel to that post), we asked Dave to provide some advice on how to score Raiders tickets in the first place.]
The easiest — and also hardest — way to get tickets is to be a big enough high roller that your casino host simply hands them to you when you ask.
For the rest of us, it’s a bit of an endeavor. First off, every seat in the stadium is sold via season tickets to Personal Seat License (PSL) holders, so purchasing single-game tickets directly from the Raiders is not a thing.
Secondly, the demand for tickets on the resale market is high. Much as with the Golden Knights, Las Vegans are excited and proud to have a major professional sports franchise. Combine that with Oakland fans, who are a short plane ride away, plus — also like with the Golden Knights — fans of visiting teams who want to turn up the fun on a weekend in Vegas by seeing their hometown team on the road, and you’re competing with thousands of fans to get into Allegiant.
Fortunately, it can be done. Tons of tickets are available on StubHub and Ticketmaster. Of the two, I recommend Ticketmaster. Their fees are slightly lower than Stubhub’s and Ticketmaster has the added benefit of being the official ticketing partner of the Raiders. This means that PSL holders automatically have their tickets in electronic form in their Ticketmaster accounts, which makes for a seamless and immediate transfer when buying resale tickets from them.
As for price, it obviously varies widely, depending on where you want to sit. As a broad general rule, expect to pay somewhere around two to three times face value. Lots of Facebook groups are dedicated to Raiders’ season ticket and PSL holders, many of whom sell some or all of their games. While I wouldn’t purchase tickets through a Facebook group, I do recommend joining a couple of them and looking back at the posts from last season to get an idea of how much people are charging for different seat locations and opponents.
In general, I normally recommend planning ahead for the best results. But that may or may not be the best course of action for Raiders’ tickets. Fitting for Vegas, your timing on buying tickets is a bit of a gamble.
The very first thing you should do is keep your eye on NFL news at the beginning of May. The schedule is usually announced the second week of the month and about a week before, they reveal on exactly what day the announcement will be made. Check Ticketmaster as soon as the schedule is released. I mean, right away. The schedule is usually announced at 5 p.m. Vegas time, so get on Ticketmaster at 5:01. Many PSL holders post their tickets for sale immediately and it’s possible you can score a bargain while the forces of supply and demand are still calibrating the market price.
But a lot depends on how the Raiders do. For the playoff-bound 2021 Raiders, ticket prices went up as the season went along. This past season, however, tickets for the final few home games could be had for much closer to face value than they could on the night the schedule was announced.
If you’re coming from out of town and want to lock in your tickets so you can make the rest of your travel plans, you’ll probably want to take the best price you can find on schedule-release day. If you’re a local who just wants to go to a game and you don’t necessarily care which one, I’d wait to see how the season progresses. Even if the Raiders have a good team and prices go up in general, you may still be able to find reasonably priced tickets to a game against an opponent that turned out to be weaker than expected.
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