Why Tatkal's queue isn't first come, first served

transcript

First come, first served sounds fair. At Tatkal, it isn't. Because the fastest finger isn't a finger. It's a script.

Let the first byte win, and the fastest script gets the front. Not the fastest human. Open ten tabs? That's ten places in the queue. And farms of throwaway accounts dodge any per-user limit.

So the waiting room groups arrivals into 250 millisecond buckets. Inside each bucket, it shuffles. A script's few milliseconds now buy nothing. Your place is a shuffle, not a race.

Ten tabs? Farms of throwaway accounts? One queue slot per session. Ten tabs, one place. And since mid-2025, every Tatkal booking needs an Aadhaar OTP.

Authorised agents can't book in the first 30 minutes. In the 2025 clean-up, 3 point 0 3 crore suspicious user IDs were deactivated. And the shuffle window? Just 250 milliseconds.

Here's the real lesson. This traffic isn't just heavy. It's adversarial. Bots and touts are trying to beat you.

So design the queue for the fastest human. Not the fastest script. Fair, not fastest.

Full breakdown in the lecture.