Card grading ?'s

[jason.1969]

More of a question than a reply...

I am newly back to collecting after 20 years off, so all the professionally graded stuff felt new to me. When I thought about maybe getting a card or two graded, I realized I could buy a decent card I wanted for the same money it wuold take to grade a card, so I opted for the former. Would be different if I had some really high end stuff and was hoping to sell it.

But here's my question...

Not just sometimes but OFTEN I see PSA graded cards on eBay where I'm thinking someone spent $10 to grade a card worth $2. For example, maybe a 1979 Topps J.R. Richard Record Breaker graded as PSA 4. What's going on there? Do they simply have an "in" with PSA to get their stuff graded dirt cheap or were they perhaps just hopeful of a much higher grade.

Thanks!

[glchen]

There are some dealers that send an extraordinarily high volume of cards to TPG"s like PSA for grading (4 Sharp Corners comes to mind), and they do receive a volume discount that most people don't receive. You probably need to send tens of thousands of cards for grading to get this kind of discount, so most of us shouldn't even consider it.

However, for the situation that you mentioned, where the card received such a low grade where it doesn't seem to be worth the cost of grading, it is usually because the submitter thought that he would receive a much higher grade than he did. Most novice submitters overgrade their cards. (You can see this from many raw card sellers on ebay every day.) Or even for expert submitters, they may have just missed something like surface crease, which wasn't visible except at an angle. There are other reasons also, such as some people submit nostalgic childhood cards for protection even if the condition is too poor to sell. Or if it's a tough card to find graded, some people just submit a poor condition copy anyway.

[yankees23]

Another thing to consider is that pop reports can also be on the high side (as far as graded cards). I continually have cards re-graded and cross-graded while removing the card from it's case when submitting. Thus increasing the pop reports.