November '11 Bid's Strategy in Bidding

Greetings,

So I have done a lot of work on my bid. I think it will pay off nicely for me come tomorrow evening sometime (maybe later) when the bids are awarded. In previous holiday months I have bid too restrictive. It sure does help to look back and see what I have done wrong.

I am really opening up my bid this time and bidding very conservatively. Hopefully, doing so will allow my bid solves at layer 4 or earlier. I wouldn't be thrilled with a bid that solved at layer 7, (especially with how wide open) it is but it does make for a nice safety net.



So, here is the bid info:

And here is my bid:

As you can see, I bid pairing specific for the first three layers and criteria on the fourth-seventh layers. On a normal month, I'd bid to 10% over my domicile ranking seniority (this month I've gone to 92% at layer 7, considering my 42% domicile ranking seniority). I've learned that with all the vacations that are awarded, you really need to go much higher than 10%. Now, my fear is that PBS will scrap everything I've bid for and award me a 'Coverage' pairing from my layer 7, but I hope to stop that by utilizing the 'try to finish at this layer' feature.

So this is my final answer after playing with it all week. Good luck to you as well!