Swoopo.co.uk - I need your help

Is it gambling?
In a true auction, you purchase an item by making the best offer for it at the time. It remains a simple purchase.
On Swoopo, you can only stay in the game by raising your stake. Therefore, in all simplicity, you are gambling your money in the hope of winning a bargain. If you fold, you lose your stake. So you may win, but you may lose. Like in a game of poker, there is but one winner for each hand. All the others lose.

There is a huge random element too.

The win is not in fact related to your spend: you may lose despite having spent more money than anyone else if you are outbid by a random newcomer with a single bid.
Unlike a game of poker when all players begin a hand at the same time, anyone can join in at anytime during a “hand” on Swoopo, without having to match existing players’ stake. So you can spend £1000, betting that you will get the item for an additional £200, and be outbid by a newcomer who spends 50p on a single £200.01 bid.

So...
It is not an auction, as the top spender is not at all guaranteed to win the item.
You cannot predict when a newcomer will outbid you.
You are paying money on the off chance that you might get a bargain that appears too good to be true, or possibly on a “dead cert”...
The probability that you will lose your money is higher, I am quite certain , than that of actually winning the item.
Furthermore, a player who has already spent a large amount on a bid is likely to keep playing beyond reasonable limits because it is surely better to get the item at any price than to simply lose the money. The more you play, the more you have a chance of winning, surely...

Smells like gambling to me...

Reminds me of the coin slots at the funfair, where a mass of coins teeters on the brink of the pay out hopper. It’s all yours if you pay enough to push the coins far enough. And visibly all it needs for you to win is a single 10p coin. Or maybe just another one. You end up spending a tenner, and each coin almost gets there but nothing happens. Then a kid comes along, puts 10p in and tinglelingaling scoops the lot! No, not the lot... a handful. But most of the cash goes to the owner of the machine of course.


I’m watching a penny auction item valued at £1,735.99, that has ended with a winning bid of £335.43. The winner has indeed got a bargain, as they only spent £218
on 436 bids, so a total of £563.43, saving £1182.56 on the list price.
Sounds great.
But there were 33 543 bids at 50p each. That means that “bidders”, or players, payed and lost a staggering combined total of almost £16 800 for this item, just for a chance at getting a bargain.

I do think that Swoopo now offer the option of using your losing bid payments as part payment for the full price item, so if you have spent a lot, then it could be worth topping this up and actually buying something. But then again, you could be tempted to purchase an item beyond your means rather than just cut your losses and hope for another bargain...


I mean really! Imagine the situation in a high street auction room/ store operating on a similar basis.
You walk in and start bidding on a new laptop (well stocked by the store).
There is one other bidder.
You have a max budget of £510, say, and end up the highest bidder, having bid £10.00 at a cost of £500 (at 50p per penny bid). You have paid that money to the store. Then a new customer walks in and sees this great laptop he can get for £10.01 plus a 50p bid. He wins, takes the laptop, you go home with nothing and the store attendant just picks another one of the shelf and starts again.
It’s insane! I love it.


I do fancy a flutter though... I could get a bargain.