By Chris Williams: The tickets are selling at an alarming rate for the November 19 fight between IBF/WBA/WBC light heavyweight champion Sergey “Krusher” Kovalev (30-0-1, 26 KOs) and Andre “SOG” Ward (30-0, 15 KOs) for their fight on HBO pay-per-view from the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas, Nevada. In the first 36 hours, 9,500 tickets have been sold for the 17,500 T-Mobile Arena. What’s really interesting is that these tickets were sold to the public and not to ticket brokers like you sometimes see happen when tickets first go on sale.
“In 1st 36 hours of tickets on sale for Kovalev-Ward about 9,500 of 17,500 available were sold. Glad to see fans responding to a great match,” said Dan Rafael on his Twitter. “And to clarify on the Kovalev-Ward tickets — they are sold to public, not brokers/consignments. #boxing.”
That’s pretty impressive for the tickets to be moving at this rate, because it suggests that we’re going to have a fast sellout for the fight. This could also result in the fight bringing in a lot of pay-per-view buys on HBO. When you fast ticket sales like this, it usually means that the fight will do well on pay-per-view.
What the Kovalev vs. Ward fight has going for it, besides it being a great match-up, is the fact that there aren’t any other fights on pay-per-view for HBO during November. The fans will likely be more willing to spend their money if they have nothing else to purchase on PPV during the month, at least in terms of HBO.
Ward will be fighting for the fourth time at light heavyweight, and it’ll be a huge step up for him, because Kovalev is a real 175lb fighter and not a pumped super middleweight. Ward has fought two super middleweights since moving up to light heavyweight. He fought 39-year-old Alexander Brand and Paul Smith, both guys came up in weight from the 175lb division.