Help? Tell me why one card is a PSA 8 and the other is a 10?

[dictoresno]

Fish eyes don't usually effect grade too much, unless it really brings down eye appeal. the location of this one doesn't take away too much in my opinion. Also, there may be a slight surface crease or defect in the card stock that got it the 8. Scanner and photo won't pick that up. I had a 84 Topps Mattingly RC i was sure was gonna be an 9 or 10, but came back a 5. Under the 60x loupe i was able to find a surface ripple i couldn't see with the naked eye. However yes, I see the yellowing. Other than that it looks ok to me.

[pokerplyr80]

Hard to see from the scans but my guess would be corners.

[HasselhoffsCheeseburger]

WHat's been said above but also those two cards have been scanned with two dramatically different settings. The 10 was scanned with heightened brightness which allowed you to really get in there and see every flaw, even in the black area. I would suspect that if you got the 8 in hand and then scanned it yourself with some brightness you would find flaws that aren't visible in the scan you're looking at now.

Arthur

[philliesphan]

Cool that you are collecting Mike Schmidt!

For many years, I owned perhaps the largest collection of PSA 10 Mike Schmidt cards in the hobby. Alas, I have moved on with my collecting interests, but still own many of my rarer/cooler Schmidt cards.

As a pro tip, I'd say really spend time with cards if you want to know the difference between a PSA 8, PSA 9 and PSA 10. You can't eyeball this stuff from a scan and be able to tell with a high degree of confidence.

Back in the day, I probably owned 15,000+ Mike Schmidt raw cards. I promise you, if you want to really get in the head of a grade, buy yourself a raw lot of a few hundred Mike Schmidt cards. This wouldn't be an expensive proposition with something like 1988 Donruss, for example.

If you look through them raw, one-by-one, under a high-powered lamp, you can quickly get the feel for differentiating between grades due to corner touches, centering and surface blemishes. I feel like with a stack of raw cards, I can tell between PSA 8 and PSA 10 quality cards 95% of the time. I think there's also a bright line between PSA 9 and PSA 7 cards. It is true that there is some fuzziness between ±1 grade. I could never consistently tell between raw cards I submitted that came back as PSA 9 and those that came back PSA 10. Sometimes the cards I submitted that came back 10 I thought were only MINT, and vice versa. But with enough practice, you should be able to differentiate between two grading levels, and from there it is a matter of practice and perhaps a second or third pass on card-by-card review (louping the corners for instance)

Good luck!

[Beastmode]

The main difference between these two cards was the 10 was submitted by a bulk submitter, and the 8 was submitted as a one-off, or small lot. Hearing these explanations for the physical differences is comical. IMO, if your going to submit post '77 cards, submit 100's at a time, not 10.