[glchen]

When I see a reserve on an auction that I'm interested in, I always message the seller asking what the reserve is. Sometimes they tell me, sometimes not. I think one of the reasons not to tell, is that once buyers know what the reserve is, they often just set a snipe around the reserve price, when the seller would like the final price to be significantly more than reserve if possible. That is, they don't want to artificially surpress the true market value of the card by disclosing the reserve. I don't really think this makes a difference, but that's my guess on why they do this. As a buyer, if the seller does disclose the reserve, I determine if it's reasonable, and if it is, I still bid on it. The best example that I can think of is a M101-5 Ruth rookie in PSA 4 that was on ebay with a hidden reserve. I asked the seller what the reserve was, and he disclosed $15K, which was extremely reasonable. The card ended up selling for around $28K, so I was blown away, but I was secretly hoping that people wouldn't bid on it because of the hidden reserve.

Edit: One other thing I've noticed w/ high reserves is that the seller sometimes lowers the reserve later in the auction. That is, they may be getting an idea for what the card may go for, and then lower the reserve to the price they are satisfied with. They may also be looking to correspond with potential buyers to they can do a deal off-ebay.