Parabola is quite right that one must assume that when your maximum bid is used as the maiden bid, then someone must have been just one bid below you.
However, back in the day when I left commission bids with Holts on big-ish ticket items, I sometimes bought several if not all my items for my maximum bid at each sale. Eventually I smelt a rat and, on the advice of someone who worked there at the time, I started doing phone bids on ALL my gun purchases in the main sale. Amazingly I now started getting guns for less than my maximum bid, sometimes MUCH less. Okay sometimes I paid a bit more due to auction fever and sometimes I lost out to another bidder but rarely did I pay exactly the maximum bid I would have left on commission.
At Gavin's, this seemed less of a problem, Bonhams were usually okay as well.
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