Roughly 30 people showed up to a home on the north side of Augusta, Georgia, early Saturday morning hoping to get Masters badges they paid $2,750 per day for.
Before arriving, most had anticipated their fate.
They had read ticket brokers were getting short-squeezed, which means they charge a price in advance and rely on being able to backfill badges for cheaper, only to find that wasn’t happening.
Other than a public lottery, the Masters doesn’t have a public sale and uses badges rather than traditional tickets.
Augusta’s 300-plus members get badges, as do patrons — people lucky enough to have been added to the list before it closed more than two decades ago.
Four-day badges for patrons, which number about 35,000, cost $450.
Some resell badges to bulk middlemen, who then sell to the public. At each step, the price doubles until it gets to the fan.
Augusta National has a strict policy that members can only use badges for themselves and can’t be resold, but the club knows it happens.
For many years, Augusta National did not take steps to prevent it from happening.
Augusta National only sold three sponsorships, had no public ticket sales, and you could buy the entire concession menu for less than $80.
Yes, onsite merchandise sells for a fortune, but there’s no official online outlet.
But in the last couple years, things have been changing.
Augusta National has spent more than $200 million to acquire land around the club and allowing others to capitalize on the ticket game has now become unacceptable.
So what has Augusta done?
The club has started to make massive crackdowns.
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Along the major roads in town are green RFID trackers that ping onto badges to see how they travel. Augusta can tell who is returning the badges back to central locations every day.
This year, more than any other year, sources tell cllct, once Masters goers enter Augusta National, a private property, they are subject to questioning.
If they are found to have used a resold badge, it is immediately stripped, and they are escorted out.
The exact number of badges being stripped is unknown, but it's estimated to be in the hundreds.
When asked about the specifics of the ticketing crackdown and the future of ticketing, a spokesman for Augusta National declined comment.
When a badge is stripped, it has rippling consequences. The person who sold it gets nailed and the revenue from the reseller gets pulled.
As badges have gotten stripped, brokers no longer have their allotment and have a choice to make: Pay up to fulfill at a loss or disappoint fans.
That loss, in recent days, has been as much as $15,000 per badge.
As brokers lose badges, secondary sites, who guarantee that a broken promise will be fulfilled, started pulling all Masters badges, leaving a market of maybe 10 instead of the usual 50 or more.
Some brokers have done that. Some have not.
In April 1997, the record was set for a same-day, single-day get-in price to a sporting event, as badges to watch Tiger Woods win his first Masters hovered around $5,000.
On Saturday, a package of badges for Sunday’s final round was sold on StubHub, shattering that record at $8,000 each.
Yes, that was the get-in price.
Unlike 1997, it had nothing to do with the leaderboard or the concept of witnessing history.
“Funny that $8,000 for a single day feels like a steal right now,” tweeted Scott Friedman, who covers the sports and concert ticket industry.
A CEO and his friends showed up to retrieve their badges Saturday.
“We called the contact 10 times before, and there was no answer,” he told cllct. “The only communication we’ve had with anyone was when we showed up at the house at 6:30 a.m this morning and, along with dozens of others. we were basically told ‘tough luck.’”
At this point, the $22,000 spent three months ago for four badges for Saturday and four badges for Sunday had disappeared.
The same fate was met by a group at a broker across the street, where it was clear frustrations had boiled over.
Augusta National’s goal, according to two insiders who spoke to cllct under the condition of anonymity, is to clean up the badges that get sold and take them off the market for now and forever.
Augusta has engaged On Location, a high-end seller of Super Bowl, World Cup and Olympics tickets, to turn its badge program into a money-making machine.
This year, the high-end Masters hospitality spot Berckmans is joined by a new venue called Map & Flag.
On Location has handled that work this year — the price for four badges coming out to $72,000.
It hasn’t been announced what Augusta National will do with general ticketing, but all points lead to a system run, at least in part, by On Location, where premium prices are realized more by Augusta.
It was known that this day would come.
It was also known the transition would not be smooth.
And, unfortunately for brokers and their clients, it is happening before our eyes this week.
Darren Rovell is the founder of cllct and one of the country's leading reporters on the collectibles market. He previously worked for ESPN, CNBC and The Action Network.