Using Max Bid In Our NFBC Online Auction Leagues

[Greg Ambrosius]

We kicked off our debut NFBC Online Auction leagues last night with a 15-team, $125 league. The auction portion finished in 4 1/2 hours and now owners will finish up the rest of the league in a draft format. Great job everyone and thanks for jumping into this one.

We debuted our online auction software in football this year and things went smoothly. There are some small hiccups that we'll address, but Darik monitors these auctions and does a good job of stepping in if anything is needed. We are convinced that these are going to be very popular this off-season and we look forward to growing the auction format in this industry with this software.

We do have one item in our online auction software that is unique to the industry and it's something we asked IT for. It's the Max Bid feature, which can really speed things up. But we need to better explain this so that everyone feels comfortable and safe using it.

So what the Max Bid does is allow you to tell the software that you want the winning bid up to a certain number. It won't automatically go up to that number, so don't worry about that. But it will keep you at the front of the bidding up to that number and push the bidding up quickly.

For instance, let's say I'll gladly take Mike Trout for $50. So I click on Mike Trout (or even put him in my queue) and say Max Bid should be $50. Someone foolishly nominates him at $30. Whenever someones goes $31, it automatically goes to $32 for me. Then $33 and I get him for $34. If someone bids $40, I automatically go $41. If people keep bidding up to $49 I then get him for $50. After that it continues with us manually bidding. But the beauty of this is that if someone else had Max Bid at $48, after the initial bid of $30 it jumps to me at $49. If nobody else bids, I get Trout for $49 and we did all of that in 2 seconds instead of 2 minutes. Make sense?

You can even load your queue with players you want and set those Max Bids in your queue before the auction starts. At the beginning of an auction, I like to do just that with the top players. Trout $50, Mookie Betts $50, Yelich $45, etc. That pushes all of those early bids up quickly and if somehow I got those final bids at those prices or lower, I'm more than happy. You can always delete those players from your queue or change the Max Bids or even delete the Max Bids. But this really pushes the auctions along when people nominate players at such low levels.

There are times when it looks like someone is bidding against themselves, but that's because the Max Bid is lower than the next bid. So in the Trout case, if I have the bid at $48 and someone jumps in at $49, the computer will recognize my bid first and show me at $49 and then again at $50 if someone else tried to manually go to $49, then $50. The computer recognizes who has the highest bid in the system first and that would be my Max Bid. So there are benefits to using the Max Bid feature when ties are determined. But in the Chat, it would show Ambrosius at $48, $49 and $50 as if I was bidding against myself, when in reality I slipped in before competing bids from someone else. Hope that helps.

As some guys said last night, they saw these bids coming in so fast it was hard to tell if they were getting jumped on bids each time or outbidding themselves. The idea is to push the prices along more quickly with this technology and not worry about who has the bid at that time. It's something Brady does so well at the live auctions; he doesn't say who has Trout at $46, he just says Trout is at $46 and once we have the final bid he recognizes who the winning bidder was. That's pretty much the same thing online.

The Max Bid also works well late in the auctions. If you put $2 as a Max Bid on some end-game player and he's nominated at $1, you might get the first $2 bid in. That comes in handy late when everyone is searching for players. You can get ahead of the game by already having those guys queued up and the extra buck planned for.

I hope this helps. Feel free to ask questions here and Darik can probably answer them better than me. But we are the ones who asked for this addition and I think IT has done a nice job with it. If you see any hiccups that we need to address we will, but hopefully more people will get used to this technology and find that it does speed up the auctions more. Thanks all.

[mdecav]

Great addition! Can I go over my max bid if I choose?

So if someone were to go $51 on Trout and my max bid was $50, can I “overwrite it” and go $52?

[Greg Ambrosius]

Great addition! Can I go over my max bid if I choose?

So if someone were to go $51 on Trout and my max bid was $50, can I “overwrite it” and go $52?

You just manually bid after that. So you see $51 and you bid like normal for $52 and every increment after that. Hope that helps.

[mdecav]

There are times when it looks like someone is bidding against themselves, but that's because the Max Bid is lower than the next bid. So in the Trout case, if I have the bid at $48 and someone jumps in at $49, the computer will recognize my bid first and show me at $49 and then again at $50 if someone else tried to manually go to $49, then $50. The computer recognizes who has the highest bid in the system first and that would be my Max Bid. So there are benefits to using the Max Bid feature when ties are determined. But in the Chat, it would show Ambrosius at $48, $49 and $50 as if I was bidding against myself, when in reality I slipped in before competing bids from someone else. Hope that helps.

Not sure this matters much, but shouldn't the $49 bidder's name appear in the chat for the $49 bid?

FYI - the Preview option when posting is "buggy". Twice I've tried to Preview this post and it eliminates my text and brings me back to showing all of quoted text, not the snippet that I picked out.