What to do when you have all but the rarest stamps

Murgatroyd wrote: Grumble Grumble..... Missed out on a TOA 2 Birds horizontal wings sport... the bidding finished at about 02.30 in the morning here in Thailand, and I didn't want to wake my wife and daughter by having my alarm go off to wake me up. So I put in a bid for £82.99 before I went to bed, instead of doing it at the very last moment as I usually do. This allowed somebody else to bid all the way up to it on separate bids. I'd have won it if I'd waited  and got up for it. It was listed as a normal TOA Falling man and I hoped that no one else had spotted that it was the very rare 2 birds sport. Fat chance. Grumble grumble.

Commiserations Charles and well spotted. I only have time to skim the titles of listings and so had missed that the description of this one picked it out as one of the rare second series of variants but I couldn't afford or justify to have bid as high as that anyway.

One thing I wondered reading your post was how you could be so sure that you would have won it if you had been up to bid at the final seconds. If I've done my research correctly, the winner was someone who has been collecting the stamps (and other pTerry and Clarecraft items) for a long time and buying and selling for an equally long time and has some pretty interesting high value items in their past profile (e.g. Hogswatch 2004 sheet and Rockall Dipped cover). I infer that they might have been willing to bid quite a lot higher than £84.99. They hadn't "found" your true bid at the time they made their winning bid so they couldn't calculate their final bid to be just in excess of your bid and it's not possible to tell what their actual final bid was. It could have been a lot higher than £84.99.

Murgatroyd wrote: I guess that was Pete then... I might have won it, I might not... at least I would have known that I'd tried my best. Never mind.

I've never bought from nor sold to this particular ebay user so I don't know but it's not Pete's main profile (and I don't know that he has more than one). I don't think they are on the DW stamps forum. They are mentioned once in a trading feedback post there re ebay sales/purchases by someone who usually mentions people's forum names if he knows them and he doesn't for this person. (Btw, it's not my trading feedback post although I do the same thing on mine.)

Colin wrote: not all things that every ebay seller will be aware of

Although it sometimes ends up - I've had this happen both in relation to stamps and to books re first editions - that you have to pretty much tell the seller what they've got in order to find out what they've got (if you see what I mean).

Alan and I were devils for winding collectors up...