Who's Cracking $250 Slabs?

[G1911]

I regularly crack out cards worth over $250. I don't alter them or resubmit them.

I own a handful of graded cards, I think 5-6 right now, all of which are trade bait or opportunistic buys I haven't yet decided are going into the trade bait box or into my collection. Every single other graded card that gets into my hands gets cracked out, regardless of it's value.

I've cracked well over a thousand graded cards by now, many over this value threshold. I place $0 of value on the opinion of a grader I do not know and of unknown expertise, if any whatsoever, in the sets I am collecting. Indeed, many of the cards I crack seem grossly overgraded (I just recently cracked a respected companies 3.5 with no less than 6 creases on close examination), or are simply not even what the label says (how many T219's are slabbed as T218's and vice versa for example? Quite a few), not to mention the numerous altered ones (some of them comically blatant). In fact, I actually bid slightly less on a graded card than the same raw card, since there is a small chance I will screw up on the cracking out and have found zero correlation to cards acquired in a slab being more likely to be unaltered or in any way superior.

Many cards I win graded are because they are not common cards, and one cannot be picky about their copy. I only have gotten a handful of 1950's Topps cards graded, for example, but many of my rare tobacco or candy cards came in a holder, because they appear rarely and I can't just go get a raw one for less money. For other cards, it's because they are tougher sets I'm building multiple copies of or even hoarding. Some cards and sets have greater than 50% of their 'slabbed population' actually sitting in my shoeboxes, cracked out, because I buy most copies that come up for sale.

I know this is blasphemous to the money and label collectors. To me, I collect cards I like and so I don't care about this, but even from a $ perspective I don't see how I'm actually losing out in the end. I have no intent to sell, if my collection is sold it will probably be after my death (or if I really screw up my life and need to turn my throw-away hobby spending into cash). I'm young, I can't reasonably expect to die or screw up life that badly in the foreseeable future. In 40+ years when they're chucking my body into a grave, slabbed cards I have now would need to be cracked and submitted to whatever grader is the big grader then, or at least put into a more modern slab. No real value is being lost unless one intends to flip in the foreseeable future. The auction house or whoever can deal with grading them when I'm dead, during my life I'll spend the grading money on actual cards. I'll sell stacks of flips to people collecting those at a major discount.