I'm trying unsuccessfully to remember all the details of my bidding on reserve items. I have no idea what the reserves were on the items in my examples, so I can't really confirm. So I looked it up. Shocking! Based on the behavior described by eBay, I'd say that you're right. In Alex's example, if he were to bid $125 on an item that had a reserve of $100 and a current high bid of $50, the bidding would go immediately to $100 and normal increments would start from there. If Alex were to bid $99 on the same item, the highest bid would just increment to $51.