Bob Richter and John Bruno of "Market Warriors" on PBS Anybody wanna buy some bongos? Well-worn LP Aspire bongos appear to be the main thing of immediate value I came away with after doing some competitive flea-market shopping the other day with two of the experts from "Market Warriors," a new pick-it-and-sell-it show on PBS. But while the bongos may bring in a few bucks in the short term, I'm putting my long-term hopes in another item, a snazzy red Coca-Cola clock. If the political winds blow a certain way, it's going to be worth a fortune eventually. "Market Warriors," which is from the producers of PBS's popular "Antiques Roadshow" and has its premiere Monday, is an amusing scrum in which four experts - Bob Richter, Kevin Bruneau, Miller Gaffney and John Bruno - compete to see who can make the biggest profit by buying items at a flea market and reselling them at auction. Two Sundays ago Mr. Richter and Mr. Bruneau met me at the Antiques Garage, a weekend flea market in a parking garage on West 25th Street in Chelsea, to share a few tips and engage in a poor man's version of what they do on the show. If you're looking for bargains and hidden treasures at a place like the Garage, the two agreed, a hodgepodge is your best bet. "I personally try to focus in on booths that don't necessarily handle just one thing," Mr. Bruneau said as we walked the second floor of the two-story market. It's very tough to buy a piece of jewelry from a jewelry dealer and make money on it. Neatness, in this case, doesn't count. "Dealers who have areas that are heavily curated, where everything is very staged, sometimes those dealers have higher prices," Mr. Richter said. The ones who just sort of dump the stuff on the table - it is a treasure hunt, and they stage it as such. We started at 11 a.m., two hours after the market opened, which a serious bargain hunter would never do. "This place has been being picked since early this morning, so you're going to have a hard time finding something worth $1,000 for $300," said Mr. Bruneau, an antiques dealer in Cranston, R.I., who specializes in Asian art. There are professional pickers who have been running through here before we have, and they've grabbed a lot of those kinds of items. Mr. Richter, an interior designer who lives in New York, is a regular at the 25th Street market and is on a first-name basis with many of the dealers. "I see these people more than my biological family," he said, "much to my mother's chagrin." That becomes a factor when it's time to buy. "If they've never seen you before, I can guarantee you the price is going to be higher," he said. But even a stranger might find that an investment of chitchat makes sellers more inclined to show flexibility. "Talk with them for a few minutes about their stuff, become friendly and jovial, and before you know it the prices instead of $100 are now $75 and $60," Mr. Bruneau said. Some amateurs assume they can get the best price by pointing out an item's flaws - chipped paint, an unsightly stain - but Mr. Richter said dissing rarely brings a discount. "That puts people off, in my experience, because you're putting down what they just spent the time to find and bring to the table," he said. A lot of these people are up at 2 o'clock in the morning so they can be at a house sale, first in line, at 4:30 in the morning and then wait there another hour to get inside and maybe find one thing that they can make money on. I respect that. Armed with this and other advice, I threw down a challenge to Mr. Richter and Mr. Bruneau: $100 each, 30 minutes, see who could come back with the biggest bargain. This was a bit of a comedown from "Market Warriors," on which each expert starts with $1,000 or so, but we print journalists do not have the deep pockets of PBS. We print journalists also do not possess expert knowledge of collectibles, antiques, artistic movements and such (unless, of course, we're paid to). So whereas in the show the pickers are given a target item in a category that requires actual knowledge (in the premiere it's midcentury modern), for our challenge I imposed a category that any idiot could navigate: pop culture. That is, buy as many pop-culture-related items using as much of the $100 as you want, and be back in half an hour to compare.