CSG 10 vs. PSA 10 0

[chays]

How many PSA 10`s do you think would regrade 9 or below ?

[Ben Sloc]

50% at least. I have had 200 cards graded and not one CSG 10.

[chays]

On 12/2/2021 at 10:22 AM, Ben Sloc said:

50% at least. I have had 200 cards graded and not one CSG 10.

I had a 9.5 come back 

[ne1seenmykeys]

I don't know what y'all are sending in, obviously, but I am getting 10s left and right compared to others on this site. It makes me feel like the ppl sending in stuff either aren't checking your cards well before sending in or they just don't know what to look for. 

My first big bulk order had 18 CSG 10s out of 114 cards. Some were repeats of the same card, however, but I still got 10s on 12 different cards, incl big name guys (LuBob, Acuna, Yordan, etc etc)

In the 2nd order I sent them, again, I nailed the 10s with a total of 9 CSG 10s out of a 80-card order, incl three CSG 10s of Ronald Acuna's 2017 Bowman Draft, Ozzie Albies' 2018 RC, etc 

You really, really need to check your cards before sending them in. 

[Cardsharp1]

I have had 1000's of sports cards for many years. Mostly just sitting in a closet. I always avoided the grading game until recently. Clearly when you look around on EBAY and such, buyers are more willing to pay more for PSA graded cards. WHY? I dont know. To me a card should grade the same across all graders. Either a card is mint or its not, no matter who the grader is. From what i can tell PSA charges $100 per card. 2 things i take away from that is - 1. How could you send a card to them if you thought there was a chance it might not be worth $100. Then 2. It would seem to me people would send their cards where they could get them graded for less and force PSA to lower prices. As a newbie to the grading game this is just some stuff im trying to figure out.

[ne1seenmykeys]

On 1/7/2022 at 6:24 AM, Cardsharp1 said:

I have had 1000's of sports cards for many years. Mostly just sitting in a closet. I always avoided the grading game until recently. Clearly when you look around on EBAY and such, buyers are more willing to pay more for PSA graded cards. WHY? I dont know. To me a card should grade the same across all graders. Either a card is mint or its not, no matter who the grader is. From what i can tell PSA charges $100 per card. 2 things i take away from that is - 1. How could you send a card to them if you thought there was a chance it might not be worth $100. Then 2. It would seem to me people would send their cards where they could get them graded for less and force PSA to lower prices. As a newbie to the grading game this is just some stuff im trying to figure out.

I can help answer these questions. Bare with me, though, bc it takes some explaining. 

First, PSA has been around and grading things since the 1980s so their reputation in the grading community (and not just with sports cards) is second to none, so getting a PSA-graded card comes with a certain level of trust, authenticity and reliability that other companies can't offer.  That's why their cards still sell for more than any other companies, barring a few exceptions.

In terms of having cards graded the same across all platforms and having it be near mint or mint, while I understand where you are coming from, if all companies graded cards the same then there really wouldn't be any need to have different companies. And I mean sure, like you mentioned, you could have a diff company giving out the same exact grades under the same exact grading system for a lesser price, but bc it's not PSA that almost guarantee of the card being worth more in a PSA slab would cause people to still go with PSA, bc most people want the most return for their investment. 

In terms of sending them a card that might not be worth $100 once graded, I think my answer to that is twofold - 1) Any card that you want to keep for your own PC, esp if it is a high-dollar card, might be worth it to send to PSA for the $100. Here's the thing, though - PSA will charge you more than $100 if the determined value (after grading it) is more than a certain amount. So, for example, for $100 you send them a Justin Herbert Rookie Patch Auto #d to 10 and it grades a PSA 10, and there are copies of that same card that have sold for 10k-20K, PSA is going to charge you way more than $100 to grade that card bc they know how much it's currently worth and they want their cut of that money. I personally think that is complete BS, but it is what it is in a completely unregulated, capitalist-driven market. 2) There are A LOT of people who are either coming back into the hobby after years to decades away or have been in the game for a bit but are just completely new to grading. A lot of this section of people have seen the prices of graded cards go through the roof over the last 2 years-ish so they want in on that. However, bc they aren't caught up on how severely the value drops from a PSA 10 to a 9 or an 8, etc, there are a LOT of people learning very valuable, or should I say expensive, lessons right now. SO, to answer this concisely, you are absolutely right - if a card isn't worth $100 in value after being graded it seems rather dumb to send the card in for $100. With that said, until around Sept or Oct of 2020, PSA used to grade cards in bulk for $8-10, so you could send in *so many* cards to them for such a cheap cost and almost guarantee you're going to profit if you choose to sell the card, assuming it gets a grade high enough to warrant selling. 

In terms of people sending to other companies, just like with PSA, there are ups and downs. First things first - PSA owns so much of the market share of card grading (whether it be Pokemon, sports cards, etc etc) and they have such a foothold on ROI (return on investment, if you're not familiar with that acronym) within the hobby it's almost impossible for them to lose any sort of footing or have another company take enough business away from them to force them to lower prices. They are just that big and trusted. Think of them as the Wal-Mart of the card grading world only in terms of how big their marketshare is and how much their name is trusted globally. They are almost too big to fail, in a sense. Not only that, but the card collecting world has exploded like never before over the past two years, and bc of that PSA got a record number of submissions in early 2021, culminating with I believe almost 6 million individual cards they were shipped from January to March of 2021. It was so overwhelming that they literally shut down card submission at any level up to Super Express at $300 for months and months and months. 

That left people with the only other options being BGS (Beckett Grading), SGC (SportsCard Guarantee), HGA (Hybrid Grading Authority) and CSG (where we're at here, duh). BGS and SGC have both been around forever, as well, and both have a very string backing and reputation in the hobby, but neither has ever really been able to surpass PSA in terms of holding overall value for their graded cards. The same could be said for HGA and CSG, but mostly due to the fact that both companies started in 2021, so they just haven't had the time to really get their foothold and make a mark as serious companies that will retain long-term value to most people in the market. With all that said, it is absolutely cheaper to send in cards to every other company (except BGS), but the downside is your collection will not be worth as much in the end on the resale side of things. 

There is a LOT more I could go into, and if you have any questions feel free to shoot 'em back at me, but this should give you a good, simple-ish rundown for now of why everyone goes nuts for PSA. *Most* people who are sending cards into PSA for $100/card right now are sending in only cards that are, at minimum, going to be $300 and up in value. Most ppl sending into PSA at those amounts more than likely have some idea of what they are doing, but there are surely tons of people who don't know what tf they're doing and are getting burned and burned bad bc they didn't do the research necessary. The same could be said of other ppl at other companies, too, even here on CSG's site. Right now you can look in the Buy/Sell part of these forums and see a guy who sent in a 1990 Score #697 Bo Jackson card to CSG at their $125 Walkthrough level. I assume he saw sales of PSA 10s of that same card back in February of 2021 going for multiple hundreds of dollars and thought "Well I'll send in to CSG for way cheaper and make even more money!" But, unfortunately for him, it doesn't work that way. He ended up getting a grade of a CSG 8, and bc CSG doesn't hold NEAR the value of PSA, that's more equivalent to getting a PSA 6 or 7, which....ugh. SO what he thought was a multiple hundred dollar card, unfortunately, isn't worth more than $8-10 in real value on the open market. People, including myself, tried to tell him this but he just mocked us in return, and it was just painfully obvious he had no damn clue what he was doing. 

Edited January 7, 2022 by ne1seenmykeys

[Cardsharp1]

Ne1....thanks for the info and the education. So right now then my gut feeling is these graders know in order to retain customers they must return values at probably twice what it cost to send in a submission. In other words, they cant keep making money if their clients arent. For example if it cost me $600 on a bulk submission, CSG and others know if they want my business in the future i have to have at least a $1000 to $1200 return on investment. Am i wrong or what do you think about that??? I realize that a card is only what its worth. But if i cant send in good cards that score high i know to just keep them in my boxes. And i have another question for you after you respond to this one.

Edited January 7, 2022 by Cardsharp1
additional comment

[ne1seenmykeys]

On 1/7/2022 at 12:26 PM, Cardsharp1 said:

Ne1....thanks for the info and the education. So right now then my gut feeling is these graders know in order to retain customers they must return values at probably twice what it cost to send in a submission. In other words, they cant keep making money if their clients arent. For example if it cost me $600 on a bulk submission, CSG and others know if they want my business in the future i have to have at least a $1000 to $1200 return on investment. Am i wrong or what do you think about that??? I realize that a card is only what its worth. But if i cant send in good cards that score high i know to just keep them in my boxes. And i have another question for you after you respond to this one.

I would actually disagree with your logic here. 

Let me put it this way - there are *so many* people in this hobby that are not only trying to grade cards for a profit, but they are grading them for their personal collections, as well, so a grading company has zero expectation of getting a 2x return for whatever you send in. It's the market that determines the value of a card so if you send in a card that cost a dollar to buy and $15 to grade but the value of that card is only $10 in a PSA 9 then that's not on PSA. PSA and the other grading companies are under zero obligation, nor do they set out to say "okay let's get this person a 2x return for their card."

So to answer your question I'd say i just matters what you are sending a card in for and why. For instance, I have some vintage soccer cards for my personal collection (that I'll never sell) that just look better in a slab from SGC, so even though the value of the card I'm getting slabbed might not be $30, it's going to cost me $30 to get the card slabbed with SGC. Another, different example - I have 143 Michael Jordan cards that I want to sell (I'm not personally a huge Jordan fan but I have a ton of them from my childhood etc) and I know to maximize the profit for those cards I need to grade them with PSA, so because the value of most of these cards won't be above $100 I'm simply waiting for PSA to open their bulk service back up. That way, hopefully if they get the price back down to $10-15/card then it'll be almost guaranteed profit considering it's Jordan.

So, as you can see, it just depends on what you're wanting to do with your cards. If you want to keep them for your PC then things like what slab each card will look best in, etc come into play, and the cost of grading is something that isn't as high up on the priority list. If you are simply trying to flip certain cards for profit then you def need to think about the price to grade them more.

And again, I can not stress this enough - because you won't get as much money for cards that don't grade as high as others, I don't think it would really be fair to whatever grading company you chose to say, "I'm not going with them anymore bc they didn't get me as much return on investment as I thought" bc it could have been your fault for not understanding what grade the card would get, for example. 

I just think this idea you have in your head - that your cards have to have a certain return on investment for what you paid to have them grade - is just not the way to go. If you are getting cards graded and protected for your personal collection then just go with CSG bc they charge so little to grade each card and they have by far the best slab (the label is debatable). If you are getting them graded for profit then you need to weigh how much time you want to wait to get them back vs cost of grading and other things that would help you make the best decision. 


Hmu with any other questions you have, and if anyone else reading this has anything else to correct me on or add, please do!

[micky 8]

On 1/7/2022 at 3:26 PM, Cardsharp1 said:

Ne1....thanks for the info and the education. So right now then my gut feeling is these graders know in order to retain customers they must return values at probably twice what it cost to send in a submission. In other words, they cant keep making money if their clients arent. For example if it cost me $600 on a bulk submission, CSG and others know if they want my business in the future i have to have at least a $1000 to $1200 return on investment. Am i wrong or what do you think about that??? I realize that a card is only what its worth. But if i cant send in good cards that score high i know to just keep them in my boxes. And i have another question for you after you respond to this one.

everyone grades for different reasons, I personally grade to protect the card for my PC but If see a card forsale i really want Ill have cards ready and slabbed that I can sell to get a better card, I sell raw cards too but for me with more expensive cards its easier to be transparent when selling graded cards, that way the buyer knows exactly what he or she is getting and cant complain. I grade high value cards but I also grade some cheaper cards if I think it will rise in value kinda fast for example a Bowman chrome auto you can find a prospect for $40 and could go up to a grand easy if your lucky, so i like to slab em fast keep em sharp and looking good and ready to sell if i choose.. everyone collects for different reasons or grades for different reasons, some just like the way a card looks slabbed, some collect, some flip and most do both., Whatever you do, do you the most successful collectors I met do there own thing and dont follow hype, they find a niche and it works for them.. learn how to screen your cards youtube reveals are great guys like subhub grading, deviation cards, bnp grading a bunch of channels go over what to look for how to give yourself a best chance for high grades.. goodluck 

[Cwalt4gator]

I agree 100% with micky8. If you’re looking to build and protect your collection, then a relatively inexpensive bulk grading service is the way to go. If down the road you have a particular card graded with CSG that you would like to sell you could have PSA regrade it. But between that time you have protected your card and have learned it’s general rating to make a more informed decision. 

[northkorea]

On 12/1/2021 at 8:41 AM, chays said:

How many PSA 10`s do you think would regrade 9 or below ?

Probably about 6% under the new CSG standards. Then again, seems pre-CoVID (2018-2019) PSA 10s are getting regraded by PSA as 6s on occasion, so maybe new PSA standards are tighter than new CSG standards.