Originally Posted by keeton
You can look at delta.com and pretend you are booking a first class ticket for your desired flights. The seat map will come up in the list of available flights. You should be able to not only determine what type of aircraft it is but also how may seats in F have already been booked.
To better your chances of an upgrade, you can purchase a higher fare class. To guarantee your F seat, you can purchase an A fare, if offered in your market, which will get you 1.5 MQMs as well.
As others have aggressively pointed out, seatmaps alone are not a reliable indicator of how many seats are left, but there is one (limited) trick I use to get some idea. I pretend to be booking the maximum number of first class seats allowed by delta.com (I think it's 7). When the website shows flight options, those flights that do not have that many seats available anymore will offer only coach seats for sale. Any flight that shows first class options, has at least 7 seats for sale, and presumably available. One can narrow down how many seats are actually available by decreasing your "attempted" purchase from 7 to 6 etc.
In my experience this is a pretty reliable way to figure out how many open FC seats are left on a flight. Those seats are eventually released if not sold, but sometimes not until the last minute. This method has been particularly effective when, even though I am a PM, I am not upgraded ahead of time even though there are seats showing on the seatmaps as available. With this technique, I gain greater assurance of whether or not the chances are good that I will prevail in the gate lottery. My predictions have been very good using this technique.
Casimir