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Posted By: Bob

Frank- I understand and sympathize with your post but as someone who has been shot down time and time again by a snipe bid after leading for 7 days on a card, you aren't being realistic. The purpose of the snipe bid is, as stated above, to enable you to catch other bidders unaware with a bid sufficient to win an item and also to not leave the other bidders any opportunity to respond. I tend to usually bid a middle amount on cards, more than just a "bookmark" bid but less than I would spend to win the card. After examining bidding patterns and the bids themselves, I try to come up with an amount which I could live with and either enter a snipe bid or cross my fingers and hope no one will bid higher at the end.
The problem with snipers is that there are tons of them and rarely can you win a card without sniping.
Now, getting back to the Obaks and Bishops. Since they were placed in the minor league section instead of the pre-war section, the cards were seen by far fewer people. This was evident as I watched the bids from Day 1 and didn't see the names of any of the heavy hitters on PCL cards showing up. I see now that several guys like Frank and Joshua and Steve and others were thinking the same way I was and had snipe bids set. From what I understand and believe, had the Bishops not been pulled it would have taken a bid of around $550-700 each to win the cards and the Obaks cards (4 nicest which were pulled) would have required a bid of $250-400 each based on snipe totals.
So Frank, unless you were prepared to go much higher, you wouldn't have won them. If sniping weren't allowed, the bidding may have gone even higher because you would have had many bidders bidding against each other in a competitive and revealed manner. There could have been a "feeding frenzy" bidding pattern. I've seen those before.
Bottom line- Frank I don't think sniping or no sniping made any difference with the one exception that the seller got cold feet when bids from the first 6 days were very low.