wow really? those are some good deals, what general shape were they in? Black Knight for 700? thats a steal unless it was super beat.

Were there any issues with the LOTR and SM?

Don't forget to add sales tax + 15% buyer's premium. Still not too bad though.

Congrats on your pin!

I have bought a couple pins from them in the past, but overall the quality of the pins is so horrid. VERY routed. I got my fishtales there for $1,200 and ended up putting $600 into it to make it halfway decent.

I hope ya got a nice deal!

Quite the sweet lineup of pins in the auction this time though! That prolly helped the deals. Normally they have about half that and the pins go market value, it's crazy/

Congrats... and that's a fair price I think for a routed but fully working FT.
I just picked one up to restore and I'm enjoying it too much to tear it down

Rob at Super Auctions used to say that all the time. Classic auctioneer BS.

Auctions are somewhat entertaining/amusing, but I don't I'll buy at one ever.

It's funny, on KLOV they are saying all the pins went for too much, and some of these went cheap actually.

FYI if you bid online the buyers premium is even higher at 18%. I was bidding in lotr and sm till they went above my budget with the fee added In.

Prices adjusted for 8 % sales tax and 15 % buyer premium...Now where are the deals, considering these are all likely heavily routed and in need of some attention.

Better than some of the past auction hammer prices.

good deal? Those prices are high for crappy auction games. people must have not known what they were doing and bidding high on stupid shit.

Congrats on your FT!

The problem w/ the Captains Auctions (for locals anyway) is that they do online bidding - so anyone anywhere can get in on the bidding....so, there's just NEVER a deal like a true local auction. Plus, the owners of the machines are usually their bidding up their own stuff. What amounts to terrible prices for collectors who want a decently priced game to restore is a "good deal" for flippers and retailers who will clean it up and charge double.

My favorite item ever at that auction was a spiderman that went for $4,400. Fully and heavily routed looking. cracked ramp, just a mess. It was awesome! lol

Very true! However, I have bid in person and online. I'm fairly confident biggest issue is the shill bidding. Same few people always jacking it up and I've seen same pin in there twice in a row a couple times.

Any auction that allows shill bidding isn't really an auction, it's a scam. They should change the name to Captain's Scam.

Unfortunately, most do it now....The auction I attend (Auction Game Sales) almost encourages it with their pricing policy...And not shill bidding, but allowing the owner's of the machines to bid on their own machine. If an owner signs in a machine and it is sold, he has to pay 10% upto $100. However, if he buys it back by bidding on it, he only has to pay $10. It is completely unfair and the thinking by the auction house is that it will encourage sellers to bring more inventory if they can protect against low bids...But so what? I'd rather have fewer titles that will legitimately be auctioned than a 100 titles that the owners are bidding up the prices on.

Yups....and this is why auctions aren't fun anymore. When I first started going to auctions, the machines were legitimate leftovers from warehouses that someone wanted to get rid of. Whatever they went for, they went for...there was no vested interest there driving up the prices. Unfortunately most of my auction buying was VIDS...I wasn't quite into pins yet. Still - when I did get into pins, the prices at the auctions weren't bad...but that only lasted a year or two before it became the way it is now.

That's exactly what shill bidding is. It certainly lives in a grey area of the law and appears to be legal provided the auction house clearly states that they accept bids from the seller, up to a pre-agreed upon reserve price. The problem is a matter of trust and I simply don't trust an auction house that uses this sort of technique as part of their proceedings, because there's simply too much room for fraud that would be difficult to prove at best, and impossible at worst.

World English Dictionary
shill (ʃɪl)

— n
slang a confidence trickster's assistant, esp a person who poses as an ordinary customer, gambler, etc, in order to entice others to participate

That's why I differentiate traditional shill's with actually promoting a policy that allows owners to openly bid on their own machines. I usually think of shill as purposely deceitful. The owner's openly bidding are policy. Of course, most aren't aware of WHO the owner's are and so I agree...certainly a gray area.

If seller's are allowed to upbid their own machines then buyers should maintain the right to downbid the pin upon closer inspection (due dilligence) or walk from it POST auction. Auctions are supposed to be "as-is, where is etc" and that gets removed with seller upbidding.

What would the auctioneers do if you walked away from a pin post auction and did not pay?

What is the most they can do? Keep you from coming back in the future...

Only seems fair if you are being bid against by a shill or the actual owner.

Auctions don't need to engage in shill bidding when it comes to pins...prices are just high and going higher for dmd-era games, as everyone around here acknowledges. The owner of the Johnny Mnemonic at this auction was hoping to get $1,000 for it. I told him he was crazy and it would go to at least $1300, and it ended up going for more. People make stupid bids at auction - they see something in front of them and they want to "win". Add in the retail people who can jack up the price fivefold, and you have the current climate. Nothing untoward by the Captains people.

I hear about auctions in other parts of the country where the auctioneer won't let stuff go under a few hundred dollars and will just keep passing on lots if they don't get what they want. I've gotten vids at Captains for $15, $25, $35..even a giant 2-player cockpit for $75 with the owner standing right beside me. And you can still get good deals on non-DMD solid state pins. They just want to move product - get whatever they can and move on. Sure we all hate the internet bidding but it is what it is

This is how the auction place near me works too. Most pins there have been buybacks. And it is easy to overbid. I bought one at the last auction and bid $100 more than I said was my max. I got outbid by $25 and that upset me. So I bid another $25 and then repeated that process.

i heard through the grapevine the spiderman was missing boards when the guy got it home...supposedly it was working before the auction.

yup, and years ago, that's the way there were around here too. Thurs night at 2am, you'd get pins, for $10 a piece. Old SS stuff, unknown working or not. Get a lot of 3 of them for $25, just to get them the hell out of there. That shit went away, when they moved it to saturday mornings and started advertising, and having people buy their stuff back. They shouldn't allow that. If they want a reserve. Make them put the reserve on the game so people know, and don't hang around for a machine they have interest in. Super auctions around here did the ghost bidding scam. They arn't in business anymore either. scammers.

Super Auctions is still in business. They just had to take a little hiatus because their checks to the sellers were bouncing Apparently no longer an issue...

As for ghost bids, shill bids, whatever you want to call them...you guys need to realize that if these auctions were truly absolute/no reserve then you would only have junk appearing at them. After a few auctions of that, the auction house will have made no money and very few customers willing to come back. The only reason you see hundreds of working/valuable games at these auctions is because the sellers know they won't get totally hosed.

We all recognize that there needs to be protection for the seller. But it needs to be up front in the form of reserves, not in the form of shady shill bidding or owner buybacks. As a buyer, I should not have to wonder if I'm bidding against the owner of the machine. Imagine any other auction like Barrett's operating like that.

What difference does it really make if there is a reserve or the seller is bidding, other than extra work for the auction company? Generally, a seller has a price that they're willing to sell at, just as the buyer has a price they're willing to pay. The current system usually works in the buyer's favor anyways. Often times a seller has reasons for needing to sell machines, even if the price is lower than he wanted, so he'll get out earlier. Or, he may approach the bidder later and offer to sell for less (even though this screws the auction company). Or, as has happened to me many times, a seller won't pay attention to one of their machines being auctioned off, as it throws an error or is tampered with by an unscrupulous bidder. On the flip side, I can tell you that very few sellers at these auctions are bidding their own machines higher than what they originally wanted to try and get more from potential bidders/buyers -- the market for most games isn't that good.

It makes a HUGE difference....It's called ethics and a fair playing field. I've been going to auctions for 10 years so I know Green Coin and the other major sellers in my area and I can recognize them and their cronies when they are bidding on a machine. But Joe Blow public doesn't have that benefit, so they get caught up with bidding against the owner. If they were informed that they are bidding against the seller, vs just another prospective buyer, I guarantee their bidding strategy would be different. I know mine is.

Tell me....Are you okay with Ebay seller's having multiple ID's and bidding up their own auctions? Ebay isn't (although it happens), and EVERYONE protests it. But it's the exact same principle.

Roadshow seems like a deal.

Hey robertmee, what are the rules for the one in Winston?

As both a buyer and a seller, what do I need to know about the fees and bidding and stuff?