[MattyC]

Third party grading, led by PSA, has been a shitshow from the get-go. The emperor is seen without clothes the second one considers how you send in a card, it gets grade X. Crack and send it back in, it gets grade Y. Review it, it gets grade Z. A grade from them is just one opinion on one day. A snapshot in time. On another day, with another grader, get another opinion. End of the day, it's just strikes and balls being called by different umps on different days. Heck, sometimes the same ump can't even be consistent within the same game. That's grading.

Which makes the only thing crazier the guys who put that sticker and slab on such a pedestal instead of using their own two God-given eyes to determine what looks best to them. Every time some PSA 9 with, let's call it sub-optimal eye appeal, sets some price record at an AH, it boggles my mind.

I hear they are now photographing every card and running at least high value submissions through some kind of recognition software so that cards cannot be cracked and resubbed to get a better grade. That will certainly help curtail doctoring, which is a good thing at least. But for those undergraded cards out there, it also freezes them in undeserving grades.

I always found it a silly and wrong case of over correction, that in some misguided attempt to compensate for overgraded cards in past eras, PSA decided to be overly harsh now and put 8s in 7 holders, etc. I used to think it was to foster regrades and reviews as a revenue stream, as well as control population (an aspect covered in some informative videos online). Whatever the motivation, the result is a tremendous degree of inconsistency in slabbed cards out there. You so often see two cards in the same PSA grade, and one just blows away the other. Again, just reveals how chaotic and silly it all is— the serious amounts of money thrown at PSA slabs notwithstanding.