Class action suit filed against PSA, PWCC and Probstein

[steve B]

Originally Posted by 68Hawk

Soooo, you're confident you could tell me if a 33 Goudey had had a light pencil mark removed in either 39'/69'/99' for the betterment of appearance as opposed to showing wear/rub on an area of the card from certain kinds of handling?
Or if an oversized card had been cut down in 1910 to fit an album, cut down more recently (say mid 80's) to fake either the buyers from catalogs or trade shows or of more recent value - the graders, or just was a vagary of the cutting processes used at the time? You'd put up 20K of your own money on the judgement? What if you're proved wrong the first time, will you put up another 20k and have a second go?
What about a 52 topps that shows a 'thinner' measure on one corner of the card.....is that a corner that has been layed down more recently to better a grade or was it in a screw down a little unequally and one screw tightened a little more heavily than the others?

What about the shiny stuff? Can you tell a card that has been shaved down so minutely with a professional paper cutter it still falls within spec?

Like I said, authentic versus reprint is not too difficult for a seasoned collector.
Alteration that is overwhelming eg chemical residue that shows in black light, bat wing corners etc and many others are quickly identified.

As Leon points out, it's the egregious misses by grading companies that causes the most consternation.
But that bothers me less. Crazy misses will be mostly rectified by the grading companies.....mislabelled flips, missed creases or paper loss, etc.

Hand cut versus factory is not so obvious and it's one of those that hobbyists would argue over. Sure, we could all just take your word Leon on this one (and we'd be right doing so in this instance above) and that's fine, but would you be happy for every submitter to get the same benefit of belief that their word simply confers to the grading outcome?

Millions upon millions upon millions upon millions of grading situations.
If you nitpick and think your estimations are so much more accurate than the graders, then welcome to the hobby. Everyone thinks they grade more accurately than their fellow hobbyists.

Again, you could never buy anything at a Sotheby's auction where you were relying on their expertise if you brought the same scrutiny to their judgement as is brought to the card collecting world.

If you don't like graded, then buy the card you fall in love with and if it's in a slab take it out and enjoy it that way. Don't bitch and moan and make perfect the enemy of good.
But If you quite enjoy the way a rectangular unscratched clear lucite slab frames a piece of sports cardboard as i do, kind of like a beautiful frame gives painted canvas a mount to speak from, and if you love being able to handle slabs and enjoy the cards without care of doing damage - even tossed into the hands of your 4 year old, and if the fact they are protected from wear so that future generations can enjoy them....
Well, then you enjoy graded cards.
Yes the grades are an unfortunate byplay. It is what it is.
A market can be established with this 1-10 scale so that copies of the same item can have relative value to eachother and can pass confidently between the hands of collectors.

I love the hobby just as it is, and I'd love it slabbed without grades.
The significantly aggrieved who complain should find a different hobby, as it aint going back and it will never reach the levels of perfection in grading you seemingly desire.

The when and why of an alteration don't matter. That the alteration did happen does.

Old cards, yes, I'm very confident I could spot nearly all alterations.
There are people skilled enough that their work would be very hard to detect. The point would be that PSA has multiple people, some very experienced. They also supposedly have a very nice piece of equipment that can allow viewing the card under various forms of light shown from different angles. Since it costs about 60K I don't have one. Maybe I should ask for theirs, since they don't seem to use it.

It's not about making perfect the enemy of good. It's about a company that calls themselves experts living up to their own claims. And taking responsibility for their mistakes instead of reholdering them with new serial numbers and denying they were wrong even when shown photos of the same card before and after altering. (SGC too. And probably Beckett)

Do I have graded cards? -Yes, from all three major companies, and a couple others.
have I had my own cards graded? - Yes, all by SGC.
Did I miss things about any of those? -Yes, for a variety of reasons. Only one alteration, which was a surprise as I bought the card around 1978-80 from a reputable dealer. Another was a last minute choice to get to the number of cards for a special. far too hasty, just glanced and said "oh ok, that's a nice one"
But, I'm not being paid to spot those things, the grading companies are.

On older cards I'm very confident, slightly less so on newer cards. The size tolerances are a misleading thing for many sets. It really depends on how they were cut.
A lot of modern cards are actually die cut and should have no variance in size.
Some sets will be hellish for grading companies in the future, most modern Gypsy Queens were apparently die cut in panels then cut in a paper cutter the rest of the way. So right out of the pack they have two different proper edge qualities on the same card. As for as I know, nobody has cataloged that in any way. I collected them until a couple years ago, and haven't even tried yet (Or completed the sets.) How will they handle it when every card in the set appears trimmed?
The sheer number of uncataloged oddities that affect entire modern sets or large portions of sets is amazing.

If I had that sort of money, yes, I'd put up my own cash against yours on pretty much any card from before about 1992. And on many cards made after that.