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! :)