For Patriots fans, playoff ticket roulette

To snag one of the 1,000 tickets put on sale yesterday for the Patriots playoffs game this weekend, Anthony Khamvongsa employed a little trickery. (Shhh.)

The trick was actually quite simple. It involved a phone. (No trickery there.) But with that phone, as the 10 a.m. sale time approached, Khamvongsa did not call Ticketmaster offices in Boston. No way. He called Florida.

And get this: He got a ticket.

"It takes a lot of years of going to see concerts to learn the tricks," explained Khamvongsa, of Fairfield, Conn. "You have to learn to get around the little things to get there."

Plenty of others weren't as savvy (or lucky). The Patriots said the tickets for the AFC championship game Sunday against Indianapolis sold out in two minutes. That's 120 seconds. Gone.

The stakes were high: Those who scored one of the coveted tickets online yesterday paid face value, between $65 and $124. On eBay and from ticket brokers, they are already fetching between $250 and nearly $2,000.

"There must have been tens of thousands of people trying to get through," said Dan Solomon, 33, of Sandwich. He tried via his high-speed Internet connection at work, frantically hitting the refresh button each time the screen told him there were no tickets available.

He tried for two tickets. Nope.

One ticket? Nada.

Denied. Denied. Denied.

It was enough to turn a guy philosophical.

"I'll be in the comfort of my home," he said. "It will be 70 degrees. No line for the bathroom. The concession will be within reach. I don't have to pay six bucks for a hot dog. I could buy a package of eight for two bucks. I'm not going to complain."

Nowadays, tickets to big games are frequently sold only online and over the phone, meaning the minicamps of rabid fans sleeping overnight to buy tickets are no more. Yesterday, the lines were all virtual.

So it was a matter of just being plain old lucky (or unlucky). There were groups of fans in which five or six people would each try for tickets, sometimes with identical strategies. One would hit. Bingo! The others would not. There seemed to be no explanation.

Tom Higgins, 23, of Somerville and his three roommates each tried on the Internet. Higgins got two tickets fairly quickly. He didn't try any tricks. He didn't know any tricks. He just did what the computer told him to do. His roommates weren't as lucky. Asked how he would pick which roommate to go with, Higgins said, "Maybe a wrestling match."

Steve Oriola, who works for Roving Software in Waltham, had a similar experience. He strolled in to work and was told by a co-worker that tickets were going on sale. "Let's do it," they agreed.

So Oriola set up his account online, entered his credit card, address, and whatnot. Then 10 a.m. rolled around and along with two co-workers, they started in after the tickets on separate computers. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

But Oriola suddenly had a thought: Purchasers have just two minutes to complete their transactions. Surely some fans would not be as smart to enter their information upfront. He decided to not give up. "They were fumbling around," he said. "I knew it would happen. People would lose their tickets."

And instead of going for the best available tickets, Oriola clicked onto the mezzanine option. "It worked!" he yelled to his co-workers.

"How'd you do it?" someone yelled back.

"Change to mezzanine!" he shouted back.

He got two tickets. They got zilch. "They were not happy," Oriola said.

Who is he taking?

"The guy who told me about the tickets in the first place," he said. "He was so upset. I said, `Well, I'll take you.' Now he's happy."