Jackies_and_Jordans

I would wager good money that your 7.5 is not due to centering. Try looking up that card on BGS pop reports and look at the distribution of sub grades. My guess is surface is a recurring issue for that card. Most older refractors from the 90s are.

Exactly this. I completely agree. I'd much rather see them pay the graders a real wage (they're currently paying them $15/hr from what I read) and hike grading fees up to price out the $20 flippers. But if they offer people the chance to turn their $20 Tyler Herro cards into $100 cards for $8 bulk grading fees, then they're going to get slammed with millions of cards just like they have already. They're driving this market for modern slabbed low-end gem-mint cards. If they stop grading them, or at least make it not worth doing, then the market will adjust.

It really depends on the card. If it's a vintage card with strong demand, it pretty much always belongs in a graded case, in my opinion. An example would be pretty much any 50's era Topps Jackie Robinson cards. I have several of those, all ranging from a PSA 1 to PSA 6. There's a significant difference in value even between a 3 and a 4 or a 1 and a 2, especially for the 1952 and 1953 Topps cards. Just being authenticated is worth it even. YMMV.

This is my only concern with what I've seen coming from CSG so far. Overall, I'm happy to see them emerge as a new player in the market, and given their reputation in other industries, I think they have a real opportunity here to disrupt the sports card grading industry and emerge with slab resale prices that are probably on par with what we see from BGS. However, I'm somewhat concerned that they are a bit *too* harsh when it comes to centering. I've seen a few slabs on eBay where centering got 8.5 or 9 but the card was very nearly dead centered (one I measured digitally at 48/52 L/R and 49/51 T/B, and another was 50/50 L/R and 48/52 T/B, both got a 9). Those are just absolutely brutal grades for a card that is that well centered. If they adhere to this strict of a standard for centering, my concern is that people just will eventually just stop using them. Especially if they're turning cards that are 9s with BGS and PSA into 8 slabs with CSG. It's good to be strict, but if 49/51 isn't good enough for a 9.5, then I fear their staying power might be less than I'd otherwise hoped for. Time will tell. I've been buying up CSG cards on eBay in anticipation of their slabs rising in value eventually, so I'm a believer for now, but I'm hoping these are just outlier cases and that across the full distribution of slabs this isn't the case.

This almost has to be a surface issue. These cards are notorious for having surface problems, and the centering, corners and edges all look pretty good on this one. The centering sub grade on this card would probably be an 8.5 or a 9.