The hard part was figuring out your request. In Round 1, which was not first-come, first-serve but rather a lottery, you could ask for ten events. And in each event there were different price categories… and different maximum numbers of tickets you could ask for. And for each of your ten entries you could request a backup event… except it wasn’t just a list of 10 backups that would come into play if any of your requests were sold out. You had to assign each backup to a specific first choice.

And so began the machinations: If you are requesting a really high profile/hard to get event, should your backup for that event be another high profile event or a really easy event? If your first choice allows you a max of 6 tickets should your backup also be an event that allows up to 6 tickets or is one with a max of 4 okay? Should more than one of us request the same event given that the odds of any one of us getting our request fulfilled was so low. And what the heck did we want to see in the first place? I’ve never been to the Olympics and my normal-life sports-fandom is pretty much limited to Baseball and Tennis.

This is where the international conference calls came in to play. Our Olympic cabal includes: Me and my wife Jenn (Los Angeles), my brother Kyle (Los Angeles), Jenn’s brother Jeff (Chicago), my wife’s parents (Beijing), and my cousin (Washington DC). There were several multi-city conference calls as we plotted out how best to get the events we wanted.