Collectors, does it matter who grades your cards?

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Posted By: Kenny Cole

Maybe I'm the lone voice, lost in the woods, but I still remember when people were able to determine the grades of their cards without the assistance of those 20-year-old pimple-faced kids employed by PSA who would do it for you. In a lot of ways, I liked it better then. I didn't have to worry if a PSA 5 would really cross over to a SGC 60, or if I might lose money by doing that. I didn't care (and still don't) whether the GAI slab could cause "rattlers," because GAI didn't exist. When we bought a card, it was normally based upon our own personal assessment of what the card's condition was -- not the assessment of someone you have probably never met, and, who, frankly doesn't care nearly as much as you do, if he/she makes a mistake.

I'm a collector, not a dealer. I fully understand that in today's world, getting a card slabbed as VG by the "card gods" may well make you more money than selling a raw card that is truly in Ex condition. That is the reality. However, I don't have to like it. I think that, by and large, slabbing is a cancer. To those who argue that it brings some degree of objectivity to an otherwise subjective endeavor, I suggest that you look at the number of threads, both here and on ebay, telling the folks they want to sell a card to, that it is really better than the grade it got. At least in the classical sense, an objective finding is one that is based upon a set of criteria that you can replicate. I don't think that is very often true with card grading.

I don't sell cards, so I'm not shooting at anyone who gets their cards graded in order to do so. In this climate, that simply makes sense. However, I really have to wonder about the folks who rely upon the grade to decide whether or not to buy the card. The fact that PSA has only graded one card a 6 doesn't necesarily mean that there aren't several ungraded cards of that same player who are better. Maybe at some point it will, although I truly hope not.

In any event, I have no current plans to have any card I own graded. If and when I decide to sell them, I may decide differently. If I do, I guess I ought to make a boat load of money, much more than if I just sold them as the cards they were before they got graded. Hopefully, that day is a long way away.

Kenny Cole