Selecting the diffractive events at the LHC energies

The PYTHIA 8 generator is used to estimate the percentage of non-diffractive and diffractive events at the LHC energies. It is shown that a simple condition of the absence of charged hadrons in the central pseudorapidity region is sufficient to remove almost all non-diffractive events. This opens the way to investigate diffraction without waiting for the future specialized detectors.