Garth Brooks elicited several lofty promises when the country megastar agreed to unretire for an exclusive gig at Steve Wynn’s eponymous Vegas resort. None, however, was loftier than this: Wynn would wage an unprecedented all-out war to prevent even a single attendee from getting in using a scalped ticket.

“I’m gonna break them of the habit of thinking they’re gonna sell Garth Brooks tickets for $700 or $1,000,” Wynn told Portfolio.com. “That ain’t gonna happen, even if it means a lot of people who bought tickets are having trouble getting into the show.”

And yet, as the first of a planned 300 Garth Brooks shows over the coming five years parts its curtains tonight, the Vegas and broader show-ticket industry looks on in morbid fascination to see how well Wynn delivers—and what sort of histrionics result.

“This is, simply put, a chance to see if this can really be done,” said a New York-based show promoter who asked not to be named because he does business with the Wynn. “They are asking for huge trouble. It’s a ridiculous idea, and Steve should have told Garth that.”

Wynn seems to know this and views it as the cost of doing business with Brooks, the bestselling American solo artist in history, who hasn’t done a concert series in more than nine years. And those in the ticket-broker business in Las Vegas, a legal and licensed business, say they’ll wait and see whether the measures are effective or if other venues try to do the same here.

“It’s Garth’s show and Steve’s show and they certainly have the right to place terms and restrictions as they so desire,” said Ken Solky, who runs a Vegas-based brokerage and is president of the National Association of Ticket Brokers, with more than 200 members across North America. “But here are a lot of Vegas visitors who aren’t able to make plans the morning the show goes on sale or don’t know their plans will take them to Vegas until a few days before. They would certainly love to utilize a ticketing professional or their local concierges.”

Brooks set the prices at a flat $125 to “make sure the fans can come see me,” he said at an October press conference. That price is uniform regardless of where in the 1,500-seat showroom a guest sits; front-row seats for Bette Midler at the Colosseum at Caesars Palace, by contrast, have a face value of $230 with no prohibitions about reselling.

The Wynn antiscalping effort has been complex and draconian. Tickets for his first 20 shows—he’ll do four shows 15 weekends a year through 2014—sold out within hours of going on sale on October 24. After that, buyers received calls and letters informing them they were required to inform the Wynn Las Vegas immediately as to who would attend with them. If the tickets were to be a gift, buyers had just a couple of days to tell the box office and fill out a form vouching for that.

Buyers were also warned there would be no refunds, the purchaser would have to bring the credit card used, as well as every attendee to pick them up on the day of the show. Each guest would receive a wristband and hand stamp they could not remove until they entered the venue. All show-goers would have to show photo ID at the door along with their tickets.

“Let’s put it this way: It’s us against them,” Wynn said. Is it practical? “Not really, but we’re going to do it even if it upsets people.” And there’s the rub. Many high-end Vegas customers are accustomed to using brokers, so there are conceivably hundreds of people unaware of the ticketing strictures who have spent a lot of money and built trips to Las Vegas around their plans to see Garth Brooks this weekend.

Wynn spokeswoman Jennifer Dunne acknowledged that resort workers dealing with rejected show-goers will be the recipients of anger however misplaced. “We’re going to do our best to accommodate them,” Dunne said of rejected ticket holders. “But their problem is with whatever business they dealt with to get the tickets.”

Still, Dunne said, within the past day the resort decided to ease up on some of the ticket pickup and venue entry rules. Now, only the ticket buyer has to be present to retrieve the seats, which will be available in a ballroom at the hotel from 11 am to 7 pm and ID checks at the showroom entrance will be random, not universal. The resort also is allowing full refunds to anyone who asks for them and dispensed of the plan for wristbands and hand stamps. Yet they’re sticking to the idea of printing attendees’ names on their tickets and the potential remains to be rejected if caught using someone else’s ticket.

In those efforts, the Wynn effort is unusual and intriguing to others in the business. Ticketmaster, for instance, created a ticketless system for Miley Cyrus’ national tour this year in which the purchaser shows the credit card used at the door and the attendant prints tickets on a portable device, but the venue only has the name of the buyer, not other guests.