The third phase of domestic ticket sales for the Beijing Olympic Games started on Monday.

Tickets are being sold on a first-come, first-serve basis with the Bank of China as the official ticket dealer for the Games
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People in Beijing started queuing outside the Bank hours before the sale started.

"I bought tickets for the track and field finals. In the finals I want to see Liu Xiang racing."

"Tickets for the basketball finals have been sold out, so I am trying to get tickets for the preliminaries."

"I am very happy to be first to get these tickets today. I bought six tickets for the track and field finals."

From May 5th to June 9th, the final batch of some 1.4 million tickets for 244 games are available for sales. People can either book tickets on the official website or go directly to the Bank of China branches to buy the tickets, but each buyer can obtain a maximum of six tickets at a time.

Director of Olympic Affairs Office of the bank, Xu Zheng said they did a lot to avoid the problem that happened last year.

"We have made sufficient preparations for this time, including the tests of our network, our credit card operation and our system of the acceptance of purchase applications. The preparation work was done in a very careful way because we had lessons to learn from last year's experience."

Last October, overwhelming demand for tickets caused a computer system to crash just a few hours after the sales phase opened.