I was always being beaten by snipers when I first used EBay, so I bought a copy of "Cricket Sniper" and won everything I bid on after that. I allow 4 seconds too; with the snipe engine synchronising itself with the Ebay server AND measuring the ping time you can be confident that the bid goes in to the nearest millisecond. At least until EBay modifies the web page's script to confuse the snipers that is.