Orios

Ok, so reading all manuals again, i stumbled upon the reason (and solution).
It is possible to use conditional placeholders within each other. However, by default Events Manager will only go one level deep,

In order to enable further levels of nesting, you need to add a line of PHP to your wp-config.php file:

define('EM_CONDITIONAL_RECURSIONS',2);

In order to enable further levels of nesting, you need to add a line of PHP to your wp-config.php file.

In this case the nesting levels should be 3.
Checked it and it works.

This doesn’t work for me.

i added the condition right here

            {bookings_open}
            <h3>Price</h3>
            {not_free}
            <div class="em-item-meta-line em-event-prices">
                <span class="em-icon-ticket em-icon"></span>
                #_EVENTPRICERANGE
            </div>
            {/not_free}
            <a href="#em-event-booking-form" class="button input with-icon-right">
                                    <span class="em-icon-ticket em-icon"></span>
            </a>
            {/bookings_open}

The result is that the price is never shown under PRICE (event with paid events)

To be clear, the condition {not_free} does work in other parts of the code, but not within or around the {bookings_open} condition