What this bot does

Three small programs run 24/7 on a home server. A showtime watcher polls Fandango every few minutes and notices when new showtimes appear or placeholders flip on sale. A drop hunter reads live seat maps for every showtime on sale and scores every open seat. A cloud sync pushes everything here within seconds. You get an email the moment a prime center seat opens on a showtime you're watching.

AMC Lincoln Square 13 shows The Odyssey in two premium film formats. They are different auditoriums with different seating charts:

Showtimes are tagged per format, and the capacity bar under each showtime uses that auditorium's real seat count — a half-full 70mm hall reads very differently from a half-full IMAX hall.

AMC releases showtimes in waves — batches of new dates that appear without warning, usually early morning ET. The watcher polls every 60 seconds during that window (every 5 minutes otherwise), so a new wave is typically seen within ~2 minutes and posted to Discord instantly. New showtimes jump the queue for an immediate seat check.

Middle third of the auditorium by rendered position (not seat numbers — Fandango's grid lies), row D or further back, and a positive composite score from the same seating-preference model used for the original manual hunt. Front rows and outer aisles are killed outright.

The hunter remembers every seat it has seen. When a previously-open seat disappears from the map, it records a taken event with the time the seat survived — so a drop card can tell you "G18 was taken after a 31-hour window" instead of just vanishing. This builds the history that answers "how fast do I actually have to move?"

Watch any showtime and you're emailed the instant prime seats drop for it — with the seat list, the auditorium chart, and a buy link to your preferred provider (Fandango or AMC, set in settings). One email per drop, no re-alerts for the same seats, and every email carries a one-click unsubscribe link.

Transient scraper failures (Fandango flake, dead browser, empty seat capture) retry automatically with backoff — a bad read never waits a full polling cycle. If the watcher goes dark for three consecutive cycles, or the seat-check queue backs up over 20 minutes, a health alert fires to Discord so a silent outage can't eat a wave.

No auto-buy. No account creation. No captcha solving. No AMC scraping — Fandango isAMC's ticketing backend, same inventory, same seat map, so a second scraper would double the infrastructure for zero extra data.