Resale prices for wild-card game tickets are soaring as the 2026 KBO postseason opens at Jamsil Baseball Stadium, which is set to be demolished after this year. The government put an anti-scalping law into force in August and police have stepped up on-site enforcement, but markup deals remain widespread on online secondhand platforms. Some critics say enforcement focused on the venue has little effect when the overwhelming majority of tickets are bought on mobile.
According to reporting by The Seoul Economic Daily on the 14th, a listing offering a table seat for 500,000 won appeared on the secondhand platform Joonggonara minutes after ticket sales for the first wild-card game opened at 2 p.m. the previous day. Given that table seats are typically sold in sets of four, that works out to 2 million won per table. The ticket resale platform Ticketbay also carried a listing offering one four-person table seat for 2 million won. The list price for a single table seat is 120,000 won, according to NOL Ticket, the official seller for this year's KBO postseason.
Along with the stream of resale listings for fall baseball tickets across multiple online platforms, one post offered to buy tickets on someone's behalf for 100,000 won before sales even began. A ticket to watch the first wild-card game at a movie theater was being offered for 95,000 won, and "blue seats" with a list price of 80,000 won were listed at 330,000 to 350,000 won — a fall baseball premium of at least four times face value.
Prices appear to be climbing without limit because this wild-card series is the last Jamsil Derby — a matchup between the LG Twins and the Doosan Bears — to be played before the demolition of Jamsil Baseball Stadium, regarded as a symbol of Korean professional baseball. Competition was fierce enough that more than 140,000 people were in the queue when tickets for the first game went on sale, pointing to strong demand from fans willing to pay steep prices to get in.
The problem is that scalping persists even after the government in August put into effect a revised performance law that imposes penalty surcharges of up to 50 times the sale price on reselling at a markup, regardless of whether automated software was used. Authorities cannot monitor every online trading platform, and sellers have devised various workarounds to evade enforcement. On the secondhand platform Karrot, posts listing tickets at prices far below face value — some as low as 1 won — to avoid detection were easy to find, with sellers directing buyers to private messages for the actual price or inviting them to name an offer.
Questions are also mounting over how effective enforcement can be. No paper tickets are being issued for this postseason, only mobile tickets, while enforcement is concentrated at the venue. Mobile tickets cannot be used for entry as screenshots or images, but a gift function lets users pass them to one another easily online. Only 200 tickets were sold at the stadium on game day for people with limited online access, meaning 99% of the 23,650 seats at Jamsil Baseball Stadium were sold online.
"With scalping methods growing more sophisticated, tougher penalties alone can only go so far," said Lee Eun-hee, a professor of consumer science at Inha University. "Since it is unrealistic to catch every scalping transaction, platforms need to step in with their own rules and efforts, such as blocking listings priced above face value."