If you’re like me, you spend a couple grand a year going to sporting events and concerts. Given our current economic crisis, I’ve cut back just like everyone else has. However, that’s not to say that I attend less events. Right now I’m just much more budget conscious and part of that means that I’m no longer willing to pay top dollar for the best seats on the market.

So what I’m going to share with you is a few easy tips that will hopefully land you some of the best seats in the house, at face value, through Ticketmaster. It’s not 100% fool proof, but I will say that I have only been shut out once in the past four years while using these techniques.

1) Log into Ticketmaster ahead of time and make sure all of your billing and mailing information is correct. Make sure that the credit card on file hasn’t expired since the last time you made a purchase. If it has, update it with a current card before the tickets go on sale.

2) Go by the official time on this site, and one minute before the tickets go on sale, start hitting the F5 button. This will refresh your browser. Repeatedly do this until you see that the tickets are on sale. Make sure that you let the page load before you hit F5 though, otherwise you might not see when the tickets are actually on sale.

3) Once you see that the browser shows that tickets are for sale, you’ll need to act quick. If you just want the best seats that are available, all you’ll need to do is select the number of tickets you want. If you want General Admission for a concert you will need to select it from the drop down menu before submitting the form.

4) Hope that you get an easy to read captcha and type it in.

5) Next you’ll be in the waiting room. Don’t refresh the browser, and don’t open another window hoping to have two shots at scoring tickets. Ticketmaster can detect that you have two windows open and will give you the boot.

6) Once you finally get through and see the hand that you were dealt, realize that this is the best that you are going to get. If you decline the tickets and search again, you’ll go to the end of the line and it will be sold out by the time you make it through the whole process again. Even if you are fortunate enough to get back into the system before the event sells out, chances are you’ll be left with seats that were much worse than the ones before.

7) If all this fails you, don’t panic. Typically, the week of the event more tickets will be released. It won’t be thousands of tickets, but if you’re planning on going in a group of four or less people you can probably score tickets by checking Ticketmaster a few times a day the week of the show.