For now they’re the 2nd biggest grading company in the world, we’ll see how things go for them in the future after this change. I’m not banking on their failure though, they’ll probably do fine. But they’re definitely looking like the weakest out of the big 3 imo without the perfect 10 & will most likely have the least desired 10s after this change.
1 Like
Could be…until they buy BGS’s failing business 
Didn’t CGC have more cards graded in May than BGS while their entire pop report past XY era was missing from their data for weeks?
Not sure how we are defining weakness exactly but yikes.
1 Like
Buy BGS and then bring back subgrades 
They have the advantage of grading comics, games, etc. so even if cards don’t do as well they still have plenty of other revenue streams. I would be quite surprised to see them completely fail.
2 Likes
Its tough to know because they constantly have “pop report maintenance issues”. Here is a snapshot of graded cards per company from a week ago and for the month of June:
3 Likes
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
Its crazy how much they don’t prioritize the pop report. Probably because there isn’t much upside.
6 Likes
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.
1 Like
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
1 Like
I remember a thread from awhile back where programmers explained how creating a pop report was just a lack of priority.
6 Likes
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:
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
15 Likes
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.
1 Like
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.
1 Like
Very nice odds to cross the new cgc 9.5 mint + to a psa 10.
1 Like
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.
1 Like
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.
6 Likes
They should hire you as a consultant!
2 Likes
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.
2 Likes