I don’t think there is one exact thing that can be pointed to. While I’ve personally experienced a few submissions that centering was clearly the issue (and by an issue, I mean literally even 53/47 was too OC to get a 10) that I am in contact with PSA about, most submissions just lack consistency.
I firmly believes it stems from inexperienced and overworked graders. PSA clearly hired more staff to handle the huge increase in demand, and staff are now looking at more cards than ever before and probably spending less time per card. Its a nasty combo resulting in inconsistent and frustrating results.
I don’t think PSA has changed their internal grading standards, but the abilities of the average grader has decreased, at least in the short term.
Grading vintage with modern standards has been my theory as well. Or at least that newer graders are so used to seeing pristine modern cards that they become a deer in headlights when they see a card with the slightest imperfection and don’t know how to evaluate it.
I actually asked you about this on Patreon in early/mid 2025 because I was dumbfounded with one of my submissions but at the time it was limited to vintage. It sounds like modern is being affected now which is even more perplexing to me.
This makes sense. Thanks for the info. I have a submission about to go out with a mix of modern and vintage so it will be interesting to see the results. Sounds like modern might start giving me headaches too.
To sum up @Paulkemon disregard my previous post. Apparently things can change a lot in few months . Keep your head up though. Slow and steady wins the race
Yeah I’ve seen this said a lot in the…sorry THE grading results thread.
I’ve seen this thrown around also and it doesn’t quite make sense to me. I think it could make sense if it’s a newer TCG, but I feel like PSA has been in this game for far too long for that to be an excuse to undergrade. Unless you mean as a way to maybe prevent so many people from sending in their cards? Because there’s less chance for their card to grow in value? Maybe they got together and decided that if people get bad grades on their cards then they’ll be less likely to send them again and the number of cards submitted to PSA would go down.
Because think about it, if you’re at PSA and trying to deal with people sending in more cards than you can handle, which is causing your staff to be overworked and quit, which is making it worse, I feel like the next option would be to either shut down entirely or make people believe that their purchase wasn’t worth it. PSA probably also can see how many new accounts have been made and how many stop after one submission or whatever.
It’s like if you have to ration eggs to slow down the purchase of them, you make the eggs seem not worth the price if you buy them, so you charge like $900 more for eggs. But with PSA, it doesn’t want to raise prices anymore because people have obviously proven that it’s not the price that’s the problem, so it just raises their standard so people don’t think it worth it.
Come to think of it now that I’ve worked that out it my head that seems like a great theory
I thought of this while responding to @smpratte , but what if PSA is purposely tightening their standard so that more people see their sending their cards to PSA as not worth it as a means to slow down the number of cards sent in? Meaning if home boy wants to send in cards to make a quick buck and send in a bulk order of burgerchus, if they all get 9s he’s prolly not gonna send them in again because he just wasted a ton of money. But the ones who have been submitting for a while will keep sending their cards in (or will eventually send their cards in) no matter what, but the ones who are just trynna jump on whatever pokemon market might be happening would be turned off by the whole experience and prolly stop sending their cards. Then the influx of card would slow significantly.
I don’t think that’s a bad idea honestly, and I don’t think I’ve seen that idea tossed around. What do you think?
No company is going to purposefully try to make less money. PSA is making money hand-over-fist with their current approach, and they will only change if and when they make less money. Inconsistent grading combined with high prices may lead to a decrease in subs, but we haven’t seen that in the grading numbers.
Let me run this by you though….what if it’s all on purpose?
If people don’t see that grading their cards with PSA as worth it (because they get dogpiled in 9s), then they’re gonna give their business to someone else, which would slow down the total number of cards being sent in to PSA, which would bring turnaround times down, which would make your staff happier because they’re not being overworked, and you’re still the king because ‘your standard is still the most valuable’.
Thats honestly the best theory I’ve seen on here and ya boi just came up with it like five minutes ago. What do you think?
Yeah but there’s more to a company than just the bottom line. During COVID they had to literally shut down because they were so backed up. Granted there were other large factors and restrictions, but people weren’t getting their cards back for like 2 years or something. That was prolly worse for business than anything else.
Also the job market rn is nuts, so with PSA
They don’t seem to be able to pay their graders very well. Entry level graders start at $17/hr…which is atrocious for Santa Ana, CA. And the most they’ll get paid is $32/hr, and even with 10 hours OT every week that’s only 90k per year, which is still pretty low in Santa Ana or Los Angeles. So probably nobody wants to work there and if PSA really wanted to hire more workers they could pay them better also I will say that it kind of puts in into perspective that we’re all out here losing our minds over grading and PSA doesn’t think it’s a skilled labor job to grade a card
If they don’t have any workers then it doesn’t matter how many card they bring in because they won’t be able to grade them all. Then they’ll have to shut down again just to catch up and provide their customer with a reasonable return time. Which will cost them more money.
I think it would be wise for them to try and stay open as long as they can, and giving bad grades allows them to reduce the number of people sending cards while keeping their standards high, while also being able to work with the current job market, while also staying the most valuable. Because let’s be honest, no other grading company is even close with the value of PSA. So if PSA lost even 10% of its customer for a short time to CGC, that would be HUGE as far as backlog goes, and PSA I’m sure is confident that they can get their customers back once turnaround times lower or it starts being worth it again.
To respond to a large increase in demand PSA has a lot of options. They could expand their operations if they believe the increase will be long lasting, or if they believe it’s transitory they could raise grading prices or increase turn around times temporarily.
Deliberately doing a poor job sounds like a terrible business strategy and I highly doubt they’ve even considered it. I’m also pretty confident they’re making a nice margin, a business of that size pays their workers what they can get away with. They’re essentially unskilled workers so the pool for hiring isn’t small. If they had to pay them more to retain them they would.
Great article! I thought this line was pretty telling:
“If you’re a new grader, you won’t get fired for under-grading a card. But you could get fired for over-grading ones.”
I think with the speculation of PSA hiring new people they could be worried about overgrading a card, especially the more valuable ones. I’ve seen a submission where all the cards under like $500 all got 10s but the two most expensive cards in the submissions both got 9s
The article also mentioned a quote from a PSA grader who said that PSA “grades cards to be timeless.” Which makes sense to me and it seems to me to be the only way to grade a card. That’s partly why I’ll never grade with TAG, because their whole selling point is that as the AI gets better, the grades will get more accurate but like…okay so you’re saying that my cards aren’t as valuable now as they will be later on? That’s not what I want at all
Yeah that’s a good point. That actually why I sent in my first card, to get it encapsulated forever
But that’s where we’re at now and it hasn’t slowed down. Prices increased and turnaround times are high.
I don’t think it’s a terrible business strategy at all. Because the customer is none the wiser and suddenly PSA has a whole myth about them being strict on cards, which is good for marketing, which increases value. Reputation is another factor though, but PSA has been through the ringer as far as their reputation being tarnished and it’s literally done nothing so I don’t think they care about that as much as we might think. I don’t think that PSA is out here trynna be this company with this amazing grading integrity and there grades are honorable and honest, so I think that they would be perfectly willing to do a “poor job” if it meant staying open for longer.
They’re making an incredible margin, and they’re paying their graders anywhere from $17-$32/hr. Which is not great for where the work is.
Oh it’s definitely unskilled labor but would they pay them more? I don’t think that they would pay them more. I think they want to lower their influx of cards that comes in, because people are going other places because their turnaround times are awful. If you can get 2 submissions there and back to CGC by the time it takes to get one submission back from PSA, CGC wins. Because people need inventory and they need to sell to pay for things and they can’t wait that long. The value isn’t as high but you can send more and get a decent value back faster. And now with PSA being so strict on grading it’s even less incentive to send to them.
. Keep your head up though. Slow and steady wins the race 
