Reply to "reserve not yet met"

Well, the problem with AS and reserves, Dave, is that you don't know if your bid met the reserve or not until the auction is over. This is a wholly different thing than placing a bid and immediately seeing it doesn't meet the reserve. Then you have a chance to consider whether you want to up your bid or not. If you leave it all to AS, as people have discovered, you won't find out you were too low for the reserve until too late. What if you were too low by, say $5 on a $250 reserve? Quite a few buyers, I'd imagine, would have gone the extra $5 if they'd known.

As I've said elsewhere on this board, an AS snipe has a different psychological feel to it, to me, than a regular bid. With AS, I find that I tend to put in my initial reaction to an item, and then alter it as the auction progresses, because I have that option--seeing how much interest there is overall, and how much MY interest grows or wanes as I have time to become acquainted with the item or get questions answered from the seller.

I know there are many people out there who seem to know exactly how much they are willing to bid from the start. But not all of us are quite that authoritative.

Being that an auction is such a psychological shell game overall, essentially playing on our weaknesses and competitiveness and all that stuff, hopefully no one will take it badly when I say that reserves have a very manipulative feel to me--I always presume that a reserve auction will be no bargain, that the seller wants top dollar or nothing, but as Dave says, wants to get buyers hooked in. So I seldom bother to bid on a reserve unless the seller will tell me what it is.