Update:

A list of the tickets that are available and the day on which they go on sale is available, unfortunately, it's only available in Chinese. If you go to the Chinese language version of the official ticketing website and click on the second hyperlink below the orange heading that reads 北京2008年奥运会门票面向公众第四阶段销售政策, you'll be able to access an excel document with detailed ticketing information. If you don't have anyone to help you make sense of the document, you can call the ticketing help line on 952008 and helpful staff will let you know when the tickets you are after go on sale and where. You can also try e-mailing the ticketing center at ticketsupport@beijing2008.cn and hopefully they'll be able to send you a copy of the document in either French or English.

Yesterday BOCOG announced that a fourth phase of Olympic ticketing would begin this Friday at 9am. All the remaining 820,000 Olympic tickets, only 250,000 of which are actually for events in Beijing, will be sold at the various box offices attached to each of the Olympic venues. Each customer is limited to two tickets to one session and has the choice of paying with either cash or Visa card.

Given the speed with which tickets in the third phase sold out, we're predicting that all the Beijing tickets will sell out on Friday. So, if you've missed out on getting tickets in all the previous rounds, you'll probably have to do some late night/early morning lining up. The hottest tickets will no doubt be to events taking place at the Bird's Nest, Water Cube and the Wukesong Basketball Stadium.

For complete details of where to buy tickets to each of the events, visit the Official Ticketing Website of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.

What's available?

There doesn't appear to be a full list available but media reports note that tickets to events taking place at the Bird's Nest, Water Cube and the Wukesong Basketball Stadium are all available. Reuters quote Beijing Olympics ticketing director Zhu Yan as saying "Although not every event has tickets left, there are tickets available at events in all Olympic venues."

How to buy a ticket

Tickets will be sold from Friday July 25, 9am-6pm daily until sold out. For complete details of where to buy tickets for certain events, visit the Official Ticketing Website of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games.

How to recognize a fake ticket

As not everyone will be able to get tickets through official channels, we thought it would be helpful to include some advice about how to recognize a genuine Olympic ticket. Unfortunately, the official ticketing agency has not released any information about how tell a genuine ticket from a fake. According to the director of the Olympic ticketing center Zhu Yan, in response to a question from a South China Morning Post reporter during the announcement of the release of the 3rd phase of Olympic tickets, "in the process of designing (the Olympic tickets) we have arranged a series of anti-counterfeiting measures against fake tickets. The general measures make the creation of fake tickets rather difficult and we are quite sure fake tickets will not be created, but if there are low-level fake tickets, I just want to remind ticket holders from the general public that you all need to go to official channels to purchase tickets."

We called the Olympic Ticketing hotline earlier this morning to see if there had been any updates, however, they simply repeated the "only buy tickets through official channels advice" and suggested that we could use the published images of the official tickets as a guide.

A quick reminder that those planning to go and try get tickets to events taking place in the main Olympic Green area, tickets will be sold at the main box office, which, as the official website notes, is "located at the south east corner of the intersection where line 8 and line 10 meet, on the north side of Beitucheng Road, and west of the public transportation parking space." However, don't plan to take Line 8 (the new Olympic line) there, as despite reports on the weekend, the new line won't open to the general public until after August 8.

Also of note, BOCOG makes it clear that "the ticketing website and the ticketing call center will only provide information, and will not sell tickets.

Penalties for scalpers

Police have issued warnings of stiff penalties, including jail terms, for those caught selling tickets for profit. According to a spokesperson, "BOCOG has reiterated on several occasions that for the Olympic tickets, we do not advocate the transfer sales and also in Chinese law making a profit from re-sales is forbidden." So it seems that the ticketing authorities don't seem to have much of a problem with people transferring or re-selling tickets at the original price (but they don't recommend it), but they are cracking down on scalpers.

Links and Sources
The Official Ticketing Website of the Beijing 2008 Olympic Games
Beijing 2008: Phase Four Olympics ticket sales to start
Beijing 2008: Beijing police warn against scalping Olympic Games tickets
Reuters: Beijing to sell last batch of Games tickets