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Todd, with all due respect (I like you and know you are very smart), I find your sentiments on this subject to be idiotic. Again, nothing personal.
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I won’t take it personally Leon. I’m not saying I’m in favor of shilling–just that I’m not going to get all worked up over it as relates to me and my hobby. If that makes me an idiot, well then there you have it.
You say you understand the whole hidden reserve concept and yet there is apparently something wrong if I just factor that into my decision-making process. Why? If I am willing to pay $100 for a card that has reserve of $100, an opening bid of $100 or a BIN of $100 because that’s what I would be willing to pay to own that card, why should I get all butt-hurt if it gets shilled to $100? The seller could have offered it under any of those platforms and I would be happy to add it to my collection for that same price, yet because I “could have had it for less” when he fails to use those mechanisms and instead employs shilling I should feel cheated and/or like an idiot? If you say so but forgive me if I just go on enjoying my card. I guess shilling allowed him to skirt a $2 Ebay reserve price fee, but I hardly believe that’s what is bothering people here.
I’ve been away from this thread too long today to address all of the points raised, so let me just say to each his own. As for Probstein, I have won several cards from his ebay auctions over the years for well less than I was willing to pay (I know, you’ll just say how much cheaper it could have gone it weren’t for the shillers). So go ahead and boycott his auctions if that makes you feel better– I have no problem with that. But at what point does the sanctimony stop?
Suppose he’s auctioning a card that should go for $100 based on prior sales, and a half dozen of you here would love to have it at that price but refuse to bid on his auctions. I win it for $60 and post it on the b/s/t for $100. Is the card now “clean” to buy? This way you're not giving the satisfaction of having the shiller or his auctioneer getting a dime of your hard-earned money, but how about giving that money to someone who knowingly turned a blind eye to the shiller?. And if not me do you buy it from the guy I sell to if he knows of my skullduggery? Dammit, thus is such a pervasive, drag-down-the-hobby, illegal, low-life activity that shouldn't someone be monitoring who is selling what and figuring out just what they know and when they learned it? 
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Now watch what you say, or they'll be calling you a radical, a liberal, oh, fanatical, criminal
Won't you sign up your name? We'd like to feel you're acceptable, respectable, presentable, a vegetable
If we are to have another contest in the near future of our national existence, I predict that the dividing line will not be Mason and Dixon's but between patriotism and intelligence on the one side, and superstition, ambition and ignorance on the other.- Ulysses S. Grant, 18th US President.
Last edited by nolemmings; 01-13-2015 at 03:05 PM.
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