Scoring Hamilton tickets is notoriously tricky. At the feverish height of the Lin Manuel Miranda production’s popularity, memes about selling a kidney to pay for seats and other indignant missives proliferated online, and an ad campaign promoting the 2018 remake of The Grinch even hopped on the zeitgeist with a Times Square billboard featuring the cantankerous creature’s smug smile beside the words “Good luck getting those Hamilton tickets.” A 2017 Washington Post article entitled “Is he interested in me, or does he just want ‘Hamilton’ tickets?” groused about mercenary New Yorkers willing to do anything—and they mean anything—to see the groundbreaking musical. And there was even a Hamilton Ponzi scheme uncovered back in 2017. Well, gird your loins: Tickets are on sale for the Seattle production at the Paramount. But will the act of acquiring them really live up to its fearsome reputation?

Hamilton depicts the life of Founding Father and first Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton. It was distinguished, at the time of its release, by a relatively unprecedented hip-hop and R&B-centric score and politically significant casting choices, with the Founding Fathers and other historical figures reimagined as people of color. The musical netted the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2016. 

The scarcity of tickets, while owed in part to hype and moneymaking schemes—such as the bots used by third-party ticket brokers to buy up swathes of tickets and resell them at a premium, a practice condemned by Manuel Miranda in a 2016 op-ed for the New York Times—is largely because of the play’s cultural significance. It does, actually, live up to the hype.

But you probably know all this. And you want tickets. So what now? Here’s everything you need to know about scoring seats (and avoiding scams): 

• You can get tickets online for the August 3–September 11 performances at STGPresents.org, Ticketmaster.com, or by calling 1-800-982-2787. You can also get them in person at the Paramount box office, which is open Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays from 10am–6pm.
• Prices range from $49–$189, with premium seats starting at $299. 
• One person can purchase a maximum of nine tickets. This is, presumably, to undercut those predatory resale practices.
• There will be a lottery in which 40 tickets will be sold for $10. Details about how to enter will be announced closer to August; we’ll update you once we have further intel. The way the lottery has worked in New York and LA in the past provides some hints. 
• If you miss your initial window, official resale tickets frequently surface on Ticketmaster.
• If you miss your window to get resale tickets and are truly desperate, there’s always a chance there will be same-day cancellation tickets available at the box office. 
• As a last resort, you could challenge someone with tickets to a duel at 10 paces. We cannot formally endorse this approach. 

Producer Jeffery Seller addressed, in a press release, the historic inaccessibility of tickets, saying that he understands that “it's tempting to get tickets any way you can. There are many sites and people who are selling overpriced, and in some cases, fraudulent tickets.” But for the best seats, and to avoid getting grifted, you should stick to STGPresents.org.