CGC Changed Their Grading Scale & Label

pokecollectoramy · 2023-07-12T21:14:31.821Z

Yep we truly won’t know the real numbers until September when the pop report is expected to be corrected and up to date. It’s kind of a mess

thsigma · 2023-07-12T21:16:09.598Z

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smpratte · 2023-07-12T21:16:23.396Z

Its crazy how much they don’t prioritize the pop report. Probably because there isn’t much upside.

jonbo · 2023-07-12T21:19:32.582Z

It has always been insane to me that this is such a seemingly difficult thing for them to keep up with. They’re obviously logging everything about what you submit and what grade it gets. It blows my mind that it’s so difficult to generate a pop report based off of this information they already have. They really must just not view it as a priority.

wisewailmer · 2023-07-12T21:21:43.954Z

I cant recall a single conversation in the past 3 years where people voiced their love of that big blue brick of a label. I like being contrarian as much as the next guy but I am not sure there is much to hate design-wise

smpratte · 2023-07-12T21:22:07.586Z

I remember a thread from awhile back where programmers explained how creating a pop report was just a lack of priority.

pfm · 2023-07-12T21:22:19.380Z

Dyl:

To suggest that every CGC 9.5 equivalently captures that variability and average grade is goofy. The point here is that old CGC 9.5, CGC 10 Pristine, and CGC Perfect all encompass the same condition as PSA 10s. However, CGC 9.5s contain a lot of PSA 9 crossovers. So on average, they may look more like strong PSA 9s.

This makes an assumption that a CGC 9.5 actually falls between a PSA 9 and PSA 10. It doesn’t. A CGC 9.5 is harder to grade than a PSA 10. Here is actual data from UPC charizords:

SWSH260

PSA 10 vs total pop
4,021/14,035 28.6%

CGC 9.5+ vs total pop
675/2,871 23.5%

SWSH261

PSA 10 vs total pop
5,337/14,595 36.6%

CGC 9.5+ vs total pop
755/2,965 25.5%

SWSH262

PSA 10 vs total pop
4,471/15,152 29.5%

CGC 9.5+ vs total pop
635/3,090 20.6%

A plot that represents the actual data would look more like this:

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Yes, this is after the softening of their grading scale. 100% of the UPC cards were graded after that event. It was even worse before. Also note I think the tails would go out a lot further too. That’s when you find CGC 9.5s that look worse than the average PSA 9 and CGC 8.5 that look better than the average PSA 10. Also when some PSA 10s look more like PSA 8s

jac2357 · 2023-07-12T21:24:47.800Z

Lmfao I was in the middle of drawing this all up more to scale aswell. Nice job. @dyl this is what it should look like. Yes tails should encompass many grades but the diminishing returns isn’t as important to highlight. Main parts covered.

wadeit0ut · 2023-07-12T21:48:23.360Z

That’s what I’m specifically referencing. For weeks it didn’t show pop data past XY except for promos. I had some CGC Perfect moderns I was trying to sell and was waiting to get the actual pop number.

jac2357 · 2023-07-12T21:58:00.494Z

Very nice odds to cross the new cgc 9.5 mint + to a psa 10.

Dyl · 2023-07-12T22:09:09.675Z

pfm:

image2112×1186 81.5 KB

This may very well be the case. Part of the problem here is that when I am thinking about PSA 10s, I am informed by the 10s in my collection or the 10s that I would purchase on the market. I have a bias toward near-perfect (“strong”) PSA 10s, which may not be representative of all 10s, and thus my view of the whole situation may be biased toward what I purchase and enjoy. Just the same, if someone is viewing PSA 10s by their poorest copies as a reference, it will shape their thoughts differently on the whole conversation.

JoshsOddCollection · 2023-07-12T22:14:32.714Z

As a software engineer I’ll just chime in and say that I don’t understand what’s going on over there. I have been told multiple times that implementing XYZ would be too hard but what they don’t know is that I’m an engineer myself and I know it’s easy because I’ve done it.

Being able to see all of the errors in one place? A single database query that I could write in 5 seconds. Being able to see certs in the pop report? Very easy. In fact they already are doing this to determine their count, they’re just omitting the rows that are returned from their database.

At this point I’m convinced that the engineers that they have hired are either inexperienced or stringing the grading companies along for more money and pretending that it takes longer than it does, or flat out lying and saying things are impossible.

Dyl · 2023-07-12T22:17:53.436Z

They should hire you as a consultant!

JoshsOddCollection · 2023-07-12T22:27:24.364Z

Warning: I have absolute no proof of this, so take what I say with a grain of salt

Unfortunately I believe that’s what got them into this mess, hiring outsiders for temporary work instead of keeping someone around full time. My guess is that they have hired contract workers to build their website/database, and once it was done, they called it good enough. I don’t know that they even have enough work to keep a software engineer busy full-time and software engineers are expensive, so it makes sense that they might have to hire contractors.

One of the most important downsides of hiring contractors is that they’re not familiar with your code, they have to learn everything from scratch, they make some changes, and then leave. The next person ends up having to do the exact same thing, every time they want to change something. If they hire the same person over and over again then this problem can be mitigated, but just based on how things have turned out I don’t believe that they are doing this

I would definitely be open to consulting for them but, like I said, it’s expensive. I don’t think they would want to even pay a fraction of what it would cost to hire me.

jac2357 · 2023-07-12T22:38:45.629Z

Even bigger question is will the cgc 9.5 mint + make the psa 9 redundant? All evidence is pointing to that.

pokecollectoramy · 2023-07-12T22:48:29.781Z

They have lots of private equity money. You should try it! Lol

darkapples · 2023-07-12T22:49:52.727Z

I don’t think that’s much of a question. A different grading company inventing a new grade is not gonna suddenly make people stop collecting PSA 9s.

Hitmonhops · 2023-07-12T22:57:02.029Z

I feel like some people want to argue that CGC grades way more modern, or that people choose to submit their better quality cards to PSA, which makes their Gem Mint grades stronger or whatever. Not sure how one would prove that. I will say that all of my CGC 9.5s feel PSA 10 worthy. I can’t say the same about all my PSA 10s, but that’s just a small sample size.

I do think PSA 10s will always command a higher premium than CGC 10s. I just don’t think PSA 10s are necessarily better quality.

jac2357 · 2023-07-12T23:00:05.811Z

Those wanting better condition collections but are priced out of 10s will find these very attractive.

JoshsOddCollection · 2023-07-12T23:08:24.877Z

Hitmonhops:

I feel like some people want to argue that CGC grades way more modern, or that people choose to submit their better quality cards to PSA, which makes their Gem Mint grades stronger or whatever. Not sure how one would prove that.

You could easily compare the pop reports for modern between the two grading companies to get that first answer, but as far as determining if people submit their stronger cards to PSA, good luck. You would have to compare scans of cards across thousands of cards and across different time periods to try to get an overall feel for it. A nightmare that leads everyone to just prefer speculation instead