Beating the Snipers

The Sniper's Waterloo

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Am I gonna sit here and tell you that with all of my philosophical drum-beating on the virtues of sniping, plus the fact that I myself am a sniper, that you (and I) can snipe an auction and still lose?

Oh my, yes. Snipers lose auctions every day. According to a militant anti-sniper whose name escapes me, vrane.com reports that snipers win 60% of the time. Assuming that this is true, that means that nearly half the time, snipers lose their auctions. Therefore, there must be some methods that you can use to stop them, I mean us, I mean me. :-)

I'll discuss some of them here, apart from the obvious method of "The highest bid always wins, no matter when it was placed". For such an obvious truism, it's amazing how many people don't understand it.

How to beat a sniper	Why it works
Be another sniper.	There's no trick to this. Just beat us at our own game. I've been out-sniped myself. Maybe you'll be the next one to beat me. :-) When this happens, there's no hard feelings, naturally. We snipers are a friendly bunch. :-)
Enter your maximum proxy bid.	This method is the simplest and easiest to explain, yet many people don't get it, and some people are getting tired of repeating it. All you need to do is enter your True Max bid, and that's it. Either you will win, or somebody will bid more than you and win anyway. In these cases, it doesn't matter at all when either one of you bids.
Find your True Max.	Many anti-snipers claim that they have no True Max for items, or that it's impossible to tell without some bidding first. I disagree. As eBay user pcr99 says on his AboutMe page, would you bid $10,000 for a jar of peanuts? The answer is probably no, unless it's that jar of gilded peanuts from King Tut's tomb. Before I became a sniper, there was an item that I had been looking for since 1984. I found it, and began a bidding war. I got it for $106.00, and my final bid was significantly over that. However, I never sat down and figured my True Max. Pcr99 was exaggerating to make a point, which is a common tool in arguing and debating. IMHO, most things on eBay do not go over $500.00, so we'll use that as a baseline. Would I pay $500.00 for this item? No. $100.00? Yes. $200.00? Yes. $300.00? No. $250.00? Yes. $260.00? Yes. $270.00? No. $265.00? No. $261.00? No. That leaves me at $260.00, since I don't do the penny thing when bidding on eBay. Somebody once said always add $10.00 for luck. Therefore, my True Max bid for this item is $270.00. I got there in ten steps in less than one minute. Not bad, eh? If you want the nitty gritty, I have prepared a mathematical analysis of the technique that I used to get to my True Max bid. Your True Max may or may not be offset by the shipping cost.
I forgot to bid!	This has happened to me more than once. I'll have an item that ends at 4PM. At 3:45PM, I leave the house to run some errands. At 4:05 PM, I say several interesting words. In this case, the lowballers have an advantage. At least they have a bid in, while I just plain forgot and went past the deadline. Oh, well.
Reset your clocks.	On at least one occasion, I timed my auction incorrectly by 10 seconds. I submitted a bid with what I thought was 4 seconds left, but the auction had actually ended 6 seconds previously. I failed to get the item.
No power to the phasers, captain. You knew I had to bring Star Trek in here eventually! :-).	eBay has downtimes every so often. Their policy is not to extend auction times unless the power is out for 2 hours or longer. This might actually be a de facto definition of sniping. In any case, smaller downtimes happen every once in a while. You could be planning to snipe at the 8-second mark, all of a sudden, eBay goes down 12 minutes before the auction ends and doesn't come up until 3 minutes after it's over. You lose, because you were unable to bid. No doubt, Anti-Snipers get very smug looks and smirk to themselves about how those rotten snipers have been put in their place. Of course, snipers take it in stride, and just bid on something else. Still, if you had bid earlier in this case, you would have won and the sniper would be powerless to stop you.
Slowly I turn.	On at least one ocassion, I've placed a bid with 5 seconds to go, and all of a sudden the internet got r...e...a...l... s...l...o...w... The bid is received after the end of the auction, and gets rejected. I lose.