Winning Penny Auction Bidding Styles
This page lists different types of bidding styles and strategies that penny auction bidders use to win. Penny auctions are a modern incarnation of the game of brinkmanship designed to test the will and wits of players battling for bargains. The game involves psychology, chance, risk, reward, aggression and a whole lot more. This page gives an overview of the most common bidding styles and their underlying strategy. If you are new to the idea of penny auctions you should first read our beginners guide to how penny auctions work or read through our list of tips for penny auctions.
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Popular Bidding Styles and Strategies
Blitzkreig Strategy – this strategy relies on super aggressive bidding for a limited amount of time. Typically, this strategy is employed right at the beginning of the auction in the hopes to win the auction quickly before it get much notice by the other bidders. Or, other blitzkreig bidders like to to strike aggressively into auctions that are closing in on what the bidder thinks is the near conclusion of the auction. This strategy is most effective as a quick strike strategy at the beginning of auctions and is similar to the first in bidding strategy. If you commonly wait for auctions to get well underway before blitzing in with your bids, be warned that it can cause blowback from other bidders. If you are known as aggressively jumping into an auction in the late stages some bidders call this ‘jumping’ and label you a ‘jumper’ and bid against you even if they have no real intention of committing to the auction. This can cause other bidders to jump into auctions that you are battling in late in the game and to jump you after you have spent a lot of bids trying to win the auction, which is one of the most frustrating things about playing penny auctions. Regardless, the blitzkreig bidding strategy can be an effective way to win an auction for few bids if you can time it correctly.
War of Attrition – this strategy is designed to keep auctions going and keep someone else from winning it for as long as possible by spending as few of your bids in the process. This strategy relies on an attentive bidder able to carefully time his bids to go in on the last possible second time and time again. You need a fast and clear internet connection to effectively use this strategy. The war of attrition strategy is most often used against a bidder who is using an automatic bidding option, such as the bidbutler on beezid or the bidagent on skoreit. The idea is to only bid when none of the other single bidders are going to do so and the auto bidder is about to win. Keep the auction going and keep the auto bidder burning his bids. You also want the other single bidders to spend their bids keeping the auction alive. Stretch your bids out as long as possible and make your opposition burn as many bids as possible. This is a risky strategy because it is easy to bid a moment to late and lose the auction. You have to be committed to the auction to employ this strategy.
Sniper Bidding – this strategy is designed to pick off auctions with a very few bids. This is similar to the BlitzKreig strategy but it involves more of watching auctions closely but not bidding until all the real competition is gone, which is fairly rare. This style takes tons of patience and mostly just watching auctions come and go and only striking when the chances for a quick score are high. This style is a lot hit and miss, taking shots at auctions that look like they have exhausted most everyone else’s bids and you jump in and take a few shots. The idea is to try to score quick when the auction does not have any aggressive. If resistance is shown you go back to hiding and waiting for your next chance to strike.
First In Bidder – this strategy is one where a bidder places a set number of bids on many of the same auctions all up front and tries to win the auction before much attention is gained. I see this strategy used mostly when bidders are trying to win bidpacks. They will ‘tag’ multiple auctions ending through out the day for the bid pack and allocate a budgeted amount of bids to use right up front trying to win the auction without much resistance. If resistance shows up, the first in bidder often stops bidding fairly quickly and waits for the next auction to try again.
Power Bidding Strategy – this strategy relies on brute force and deep pockets. This is the win at any cost strategy, spending hundreds if not thousands of bids to win virtually every auction you enter. This strategy can be very effective if the other players can easily access your bidding history, like on skoreit.com, and see that you will bid hundreds or thousands of times and will simply not bid against you, unless they are new or making a common bidding mistake. This strategy is a long term strategy designed to give yourself the reputation not to be bid against making the average auction much easier for you. Our power bidding strategy article covers this type of bidding strategy and how to fight against it.
If you enjoyed this article be sure to read our growing collection of online penny auction strategies.
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