Hank, DCS the Dallas Card Show.

And, yes some hotels at the National posted signs in their lobby's and everywhere else to fend of trade night happenings, while other hotels had their lobby's, bars, hallways, and other nooks and cranny's overflowing with people plying their wares.

Thanks, and interesting. Of course, there has always been some hotel room action ancillary to the main event, but it sounds like maybe even Rosemont can no longer accommodate the demand for space to wheel and deal. If they can put up these data centers the size of the Pentagon seemingly overnight, seems like there might be money to made building a mega-convention center somewhere on the order of twice the size of the big ones now to handle this and other conventions that have outgrown the current generation of trade shows. Certainly seems like ours is busting at the seams, with wait lists for expensive tables, the proliferation of suitcase dealers, etc.

All this stuff is a product of the sold-out showroom. I saw the overflow upstairs; there is plenty of space to expand the show in Rosemont. Maybe break the logjam on dealers and the bigger informal stuff gets folded back into the main show.

FWIW, I have called for trade nights to be age-gated for quite some time now. Keep the adults from commercializing a fun kids' event. The VIP lounge had people set up selling even before the show opened on Wednesday. There was even a bit of a scrum in the morning when the lounge opened. Bunches of dealers lurching into the space to open up shop. I even saw vintage there.

There have been ancillary events for specialized collectors that have parasitically run with the NSCC for some time. In Cleveland, there was a postcard show. This year in CHi there was the soccer show; that would be fun to hit next year, maybe if it happens again.

Informal selling has always been a feature of memorabilia conventions; it is relatively new to this thing of ours because tables at the National used to be available.I have a fun story on parasite shows and informal sales events, gonna run it in my column next week.

I figured they were checked out or just running late to the airport

Fascinating.

It was unbearable.

The hyatt lobby was overrun with "traders" everyday. You couldn't get decent food at all at the hyatt...due to the crowds of traders everywhere.

I stayed there and ate there 2-3 nights. It wasn't difficult to get into the restauarant except at rush hours. As for the food, I had the hambuger, it was flame grilled, tasted great and was big. I stuck with it.

And the buffet in the morning was very good. I had nice breakfasts with several friends each day.

As for the trade nights there, there were a ton of kids having fun. It didn't bother me. They could be doing much worse. I even had fun watching them and asking questions. All of the young teens to 20s-30s crowd were really nice when I asked questions. It was cool seeing them rip about a hundred packs in front of me and throw almost all of the contents away. They were like scratch-offs!

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Yeah, I'm a lot more comfortable with kids trading with other kids, and not adults. Learning "business" skills is cool, but too many things can go sideways when unrelated children and adults are having commercial dealings. Not all adults are well-intentioned, and some of them are more than willing to steal and perpetrate other crimes on kids.

Kids are more informed now and less likely to be fleeced by unscrupulous dealers than at any point in collecting history. Each of them holds a supercomputer beyond comprehension a generation ago. Yes, they take a lot of time when they're viewing a showcase, because they're more analytical in everything they do. It's quite impressive. Outside of being armed with a Beckett Monthly, past generations of kids were at the mercy of dealers when their parents dropped them off at the card shop with $20. Now they know more than many of the sellers and they're sitting on legit bankrolls. There's just a whole different level of commerce going on now.

It can be surprising how much cash some of these teenagers pull out when making a big deal.

You nailed it...true statement.

If it were my 12 year old son, he wouldn't be in a corner somewhere doing business with a 40 year old man. Just sayin.

You guys are aware that there are men who friend children for less than good reasons, right? I could direct you to some institutions that have been besigned by men taking improper sexual interest in young people.

I don't know how this turned into a child molestation thread, but pretty sure that isn't happening in the lobby of the Rosemont Hyatt.

While it is a bit overwhelming, the trade nights are very safe as far as I can tell(they tend to look out for each other) and I wouldn't worry about the 12-14 year olds being taken advantage of, those that attend and set up are very, very astute on what they are dealing with. It is usually the casual adult sellers that might not know what they have, and make the mistakes..

Seriously, Jeff, or are you being facetious?

If I was still in business today, I wouldn't want to be going up against a 15 year-old with AI at his or her beck and call, along with all the other information at their fingertips, and thinking I would come out on top in any kind of dealings. All I could rely on would be my honesty and the fact that I was instinctively good at what I did. The movie "The Pirates of Silicon Valley" captures so well an earlier generation of teenagers named Bill Gates and Steve Jobs taking the old pros at IBM and Xerox, respectively, to the cleaners with the knowledge they had picked up at the Palo Alto computer club and other places. In the immortal words of Kurt Vonnegut: "And so it goes..."

Not sure why we should be frightened of AI. At this point, it's little more than a BS artist tied to some data, which is often wrong, because it almost always grabs incomplete, irrelevant, or outdated information.

Especially when it comes to vintage pieces, this crowd has zero to fear from AI and the kids. Now if it's pokemon and ultra modern, then your fears are probably well-founded.

AI has helped me quite a bit identify cards, research cards, wave of the future.

Dealers aren’t scared of AI, they just stick to their prices :D

I say we block all WiFi and HotSpot Signals( Like a Fed Pen.) at a large major show make it known ahead of time enter at your own risk!!

That would be a hoot !! Hahaha, people would have a panic attack without their beloved internet access.

I had fun talking to the horror convention people in the Hyatt.

Did you meet any celebrities there? About 15 years ago when the National overlapped with the Horror Hound Weekend, I stayed in their host hotel and met several celebs in the lobbies and elevator areas. Some were very well-known in the horror genre and from popular TV shows, and all of them were very nice!

No! My hotel was so swamped in the lobby at night I literally made like Reggie Jackson after the 1977 World Series just to make it back to my room. Just too many people taking up too much room in the lobby and bar area. It was nuts.

hyatt?

Interesting dichotomy between vintage and shiny. I just assumed (and we know what happens, etc...) that by now or very soon AI would be able to grab all the published results of sales and auctions of anything, synthesize the results, and issue a recommended negotiating posture for collectors and dealers to do with as they will. It's what we used to do in our heads and hearts, but I would think AI could perform that task so much more quickly, comprehensively, and accurately using the plethora of online information at its disposal.

Were they all wheeling and dealing, kind of like a second show? And was this a promoted event, i.e. "trade night," or more organic?

Pete, yes, it was Hyatt.

Hank, I’m not sure what it was — but suddenly the entire lobby and bar area was swarming with hundreds of collectors and their cases. All of their cards spread out on the floor, tables, etc. After a day navigating the crowds on the National floor, this was annoying af.

Did you plow over some kids? Bury them?! lol. That Reggie clip is all-time.

Stupid question coming….
 

what are they trading? Trying to take advantage of another that has a card they know they can sell for more? Or each kid has buyers of different things elsewhere and are swapping to reposition?

Doesn't VCP already do that? Not sure that requires any fancy AI to get the job done.

It was everything, old and new. I stopped at about 5 spots in the Hyatt lobby while waiting for other members of our group to come down. I priced a Jim Brown Rookie and several other 1950's star cards among the new shiny stuff. In those few stops I only saw one pre-war card but I have to think there were some there.

This is exactly what's wrong with the hobby now.

Shows are packed with these kids (who have rich fathers) and they're looking to buy / trade whatever they can to make a quick buck. This has created artifical prices that cannot be maintained long-term. You would think that people learned their lesson after the 2021 collapse, but nope, they're still at it ...

I'd guess VCP is already using AI, seems a match made in heaven.

I saw a couple that I’m sure only I recognized in the middle of a trade night. I enjoy that genre and would have spent more time there if I knew it was going on.

I’m going to pay attention next year.

Tony Schaefer from Monster Cards (a great guy and a great dealer) is a member here but rarely posts. He goes to the National every year and posts a great summary. Hopefully he doesn't mind me posting the link here!

http://www.monstercards.net/columns/national2025.html

I realize that everyone these days claims to be using AI, even when it's nothing more than a simple computer program that has precisely zero AI involved. So as a result, any old tech solution probably leads us to think that AI must be in there somewhere.

Along those lines, I suspect VCP is less AI and more just good old fashioned software and a website backed by a whole bunch of data that's scraped/downloaded into a gigantic database. No need for machine learning and artificial intelligence to interpret that data.

Probably right.

When I set up at shows since COVID, the kids are bigger sharks than we ever were at their ages. One kid even asked me: "What can I do to put you into this card today?" I thought I was buying a used car. They are aggressive, zero-sum AND they have a variety of scams they try to pull. Like the trade-up challenge. They try to shark their way from a common card to a major card by convincing dealers to give them an advantage in a trade, then moving on to the next dealer and repeating. I never would have thought to do something like that at that age.

As for the energy of the show, loved it, even if 99% of the trader-dealers had nothing of interest to me.

I didn't see much spillover amateur dealing in the Hilton lobby, I suspect because of the layout: it's mostly bar and every inch was taken by older collectors drinking (or in my case, hanging out with the drinkers). I did visit the Hyatt on Tuesday evening and noted the numbers of collectors at tables with cards all over the lobby and I figured that was a good thing, but I didn't pay much attention to it because I had seen High Anxiety the month before at a Hitchcock festival in NYC and all I could think of was to look in the glass elevators for Dr. Richard Harpo Thorndyke (Mel Brooks).

How times have changed ...
 

When I was a kid, I was scavenging empty pop bottles to get the refund money to buy a few 10 cent packs. How times have changed! :)