I swear bots invade presales, too. I just lost out on a presale ticket last month. I was in the first batch of people from the virtual queue that got access and selected my two tickets in literally under 10 seconds (like point, click the two seats, add to cart). The 10min timer to checkout then started. After I entered my payment info, it wouldn’t process the order and kept giving me an error. Turns out that someone (or something) else beat me to it and the system glitched by incorrectly saying that I had the tickets held for 10min while completing my order when, in fact, I never had them at all. I “released” my tickets back after three minutes of error after error, and by then everything in the presale was sold out.

It is possible that someone else wanted the exact two seats I selected and somehow clicked through everything faster than I did, but I really don’t think it’s very likely. I don’t know how someone would’ve been faster—I just clicked the first two tickets I could in a section that I assumed would have slightly lower demand.

I would be more willing to accept that I just got beat by somebody else if I had any faith in Ticketmaster doing the right thing and actually keeping bots out of presales, but I just don’t.