1.9 million Olympic tickets to be sold by lottery

Overwhelming demand means it will all come down to luck if you want a ticket to the Beijing Olympics. The organizers of the 2008 Games say nearly 1.9 million tickets will be sold by lottery.

It will all depend on the luck of the draw.

Ticket buyers have to submit their applications between December 10th and 30th on an official web-site.

And then, keep their fingers crossed.

The organizers of the Beijing Olympics decided to sell the tickets by lottery again following the crash of the online booking system last week.

About 1.85 million tickets went on sale last Tuesday on a first-come-first-serve basis through the ticketing web-site, a hotline and 1,000 designated bank branches.

But the web-site crashed within hours as the demand was eight times more than what the web-site could handle.

Organizers suspended sales that very day, and apologized to the public for the inconvenience.

But they promised on Monday that those who successfully booked last week will get their tickets.

A total of seven million tickets are available for the Games. Three fourths of them are reserved for domestic sales. The first 1.6 million tickets were allocated after a lottery earlier this year.

Editor:Zhang Ning