Bejing — Beijing Olympic ticket-seekers complained of delays purchasing online, slow lines, and queue-jumpers as the final round of sales began in China yesterday.

About 1.38 million tickets, some 20% of the total for the August 8-24 Games, went on sale at Bank of China branches countrywide and through the official ticketing Web site.

Organizers had said there would be no repeat of the ticket release in October when the online system crashed. Spectators began queuing yesterday hours before the 9 a.m. release time, and others joined them after failing to buy online.

“I couldn’t get them on the Web site and had to try my chances queuing,” a commercial director of Mexican bakery giant Grupo Bimbo SAB, Ricardo Martinez, said outside a bank branch in Beijing’s central business district. “The queue just moved a few meters in two hours and many people are queue-jumping.”

Organizers had warned last month that online sales “may slow” under the volume of people trying to access the Web site. A public relations officer, Ma Jingyi, decided to line up for a ticket because she didn’t trust the Web site.

“I was proved right because my friends and family couldn’t get to the last step of getting the online ticket order processed,” Ms. Ma said.

Hits for online bookings averaged 15 million an hour between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. local time yesterday and accounted for half the tickets sold, the director of ticketing at the organizing committee, Zhu Yan, said on its Web site. In the first hour of sales, the number of hits exceeded 27 million, he said. The committee processed and sold 320,000 tickets yesterday, the Web site said.

By 9:50 a.m. yesterday, tickets for four semifinal events were sold out, including the August 20 110-meter hurdles featuring China’s world record-holder Liu Xiang, the organizing committee said on its Web site.