Applying Game Theory to a Sunday Night return from Macau

Sunday nights around 11PM at the ferry terminal in Macau are chaotic, where you can see groups of people moving from gate to gate. At this time, there are ferries leaving every 15 minutes or so, and there are way more prospective passengers than available spaces on each boat. I arrived at the ferry at 11PM, but could only get a 2:30 AM ticket. Now what?

People who have tickets for the proper time have no problem getting on, but the ticket vendors allow you to use tickets purchased for later times on earlier ferries. To do this, you need to wait on their standby line. This allows them to fill up each ferry to capacity even when there are no-shows.

The problem is there's a magical cut off in the standby line after which no one gets on. As the time nears for the ferries departure, the inevitable late comers arrive and fill up seats on the ferry. Ticketholders are allowed to board right up till the scheduled time of departure (the ferry actually leaves around 5 minutes after the scheduled time). Only after the scheduled time are the hopefuls from the standby line allowed to board.

Some thoughts:

• Standby lines for the ferries soonest to depart are the longest.
• You can look into the waiting room for each of the gates to gauge how full they are... but they all get pretty full even 15 minutes before leaving (standing room only)
• There's no sure fire way to know how many standby spots are available, BUT I don't think you need to know this to have a good strategy.
• People on standby lines often have tickets for the next outbound ferry (I saw a fair amount of people holding the 1230 ticket on the 1215 standby line). If you know Cantonese you can try exchanging your ticket for theirs, as any future ticket is valid for the standby line. They lose nothing and you get a ticket for the next ferry.
  

From my experience, there's on average 10-20 standby spots available per ferry. This is a small number considering the standby lines can get to be 100 persons long or more. However, from my experience, most people do not know this (Game Theory's Nash Equilibrium doesn't exist at the ferry terminal). You can use this to your advantage.

The size of the standby lines dramatically decrease the further out the scheduled time to depart is. I've found that ferries 30 minutes ahead have decently short lines.

In looking for a standby line, I would look for any line that is dramatically shorter than the one immediately earlier than it. However, if this line still has 30 or more people, go ahead to the next line.