The word that Prince would be coming to Fresno reached my apartment at 7:30 a.m. on Friday.

My roommate is a die hard Prince fan. Normally she’s a bear when it comes to slumber, but was up and mapping out how she would pay for tickets, who would go with her and what she would wear.

This is how I knew that on Saturday, we would spend the morning at the Save Mart Center ticket office waiting for tickets to go on sale at noon.

That didn’t happen for me. I slept until 10: 00 a.m. and she had already been waiting outside the ticket office for an hour.

I have yet to reach the love and dedication she has for Prince.

If you aren’t familiar with how popular artists’ concert tickets are sold at SMC, let me fill you in.

SMC employees round up the patient people and explain that in order to buy tickets, they’ll have to go through a lottery.

The lottery starts with the employees handing out raffle tickets at a designated time to each person who will purchase tickets.

After the raffle tickets have been handed out, the employees ask the concert enthusiasts to come back at the time they announce to begin lining up at the ticket office.

When that time comes, the first group of five is picked from the raffle to line up.

This is repeated until everyone who had a raffle ticket is lined up.

People who arrived after the last call for raffle tickets are placed in a ‘late line’ and are lined up after every raffle ticket holder is in line.

This means that regardless of how early you arrived at the SMC, anyone who showed up before the raffle draw time could potentially be the first in line to buy tickets.
I was in the fifth group of people. Twenty-five people were ahead of me in line.

At noon, Prince tickets went on sale. When I stepped up to the window at 12:07 p.m., tickets in my price range were sold out.

The people who decided to go to the ticket booth were competing with people who were purchasing their tickets online through Ticketmaster.

However, Ticketmaster charges extra fees to buy tickets through its service.

All of this leads me to the question of whether this lottery system is even worth chancing?

I walked away from the ticket booth empty-handed on Saturday.

After an hour of looking online for tickets, my roommate finally found a decent pair.

I bought them for her as a graduation present; I also paid the extra fees.

Had we just bought the tickets on Ticketmaster in the first place, we may have had an even better row.

If venues continue using this lottery, then Ticketmaster and it’s extra fees seem like the better route.

Of course, if luck runs in your system, then gamble and play the lottery all you want.

But when it comes to an iconic figure like Prince, you may not want to test your luck

I know that now.