re: Four LSU/Bama tix available at uTurnbids.com...

Looks to me like it is more of a raffle than an auction platform. Since you are paying for each bid everyone who bids will pay something (could be a little, could be a lot depending on your number of bids) but only one will walk away with the prize.

It actually is not a raffle because you have to PAY what you bid if you win. A raffle is pure random chance. Here you know how many unique bids are out there and what % complete the auction is, so you can better estimate where to bid. If you see the number of unique bids go up when you place your bids, you know you have a potential winning bid!

great question. If there are no unique bids, the winner is (stay with me here) -the first participant to bid the lowest bid amount duplicated the least amount of times.. Got It?

example:

10 people bid $10.13
2 people bid $17.55
7 people bid $ 5.01

The first member to have bid $17.55 wins. Even though $5.01 is lower it had 7 bids at that amount. Uturnbids.com time stamps each bid, so they know when and who bid what amount at precisely what time.

What stops the seller, in this case uturnbids, from bidding or 'telling a friend to bid' half of the required bids +1?

Hypothetical:
I'm auctioning a $2000 tv.
If I'm the seller, I know how many bids end the auction.
Required bids needed to end auction = 1000 bids = $1000
If all 1000 bids were somehow unique, then $0.01 - $10.00 could all be bid.
BUT, if I bid 501 times from $0.01 - $5.01 there are only 499 possible remaining bids. At worst, I win with the $5.00 bid because there aren't enough possible bids remaining to cancel out my 500 other bids.
Worst case cost is $506 if I tell my accomplice what the ending bid count will be. (Or, I could simply create a separate user name like some on the rant do)
I keep the $2000 TV, I get my own $506 for bidding, and I get the $499 from all of the suckers.
Amount lost = $0
Amount gained = $499

quote:

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On the other hand, right now there are less than 300 bids on the 4-lsu tickets... so you could buy 300$ worth, .01 - 3.00 and win the tickets with a unique bid somewhere in between. Obviously there could be a spike in bids this last hour.

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There are less than 300 UNIQUE BIDS! I would have to imagine that there are well over 1000 total bids. I bet the winner in this one is at least over $1.00 in my opinion.

>>>

when do they announce the winners?

LSU-Alabama Tickets (4) -- Winning Bid: $0.05
The winner was Michael Theriot of Baton Rouge, LA. This item was up for bid for only three days and had 682 bids placed on it ranging from $0.01 to $103.33.


DAMN!

I bet 0.08 FWIW.

my lowest bid was $0.14