I was going through some of my old graded cards and I suddenly noticed something I had never noticed before.
A long time ago I sent in Dutch Base set holos to get graded. Today I noticed that of all my cards, the Charizard is labeled differently.
It is labeled under ‘2000 pokemon game’ and then as a sublabel it has ‘Dutch’ wheres all the other dutch card are just graded under ‘1999 Pokemon Game Dutch’. They even changed the online entry of the zard to be this update version, but the slab is still unique? Does this happen often? Is it rare in a way?
I’ve been on and off working on a tool to parse PSA population data and for the past year PSA labelling inconsistencies have been the absolute bane of my life. It’s best to just not question it.
The Blastoise here is part of the 1999 Pokemon Dutch set, whereas the Charizard was part of the 2000 Pokemon Game set and features a description of “Dutch” - it appears that PSA have since corrected this themselves as if you visit the Charizard’s certification page (www.psacard.com/cert/23594481) the 1999 Pokemon Dutch set is shown instead of the generic 2000 set.
As one example of why it’s best to just ignore the label inconsistencies, here are all the different labels they apply to reverse holofoil cards (sometimes an individual set contains multiple of these):
Rev. Rev.Foil Rev. Foil Reverse Reverse Foil Reverse Foil Foil Reverse Holo Reverse Holofoil Rev.Holo RV. FL. Mirror Holo Reserve Reserve Foil
The amount of hurdles I have to go through to normalise this data is just stupid.
If anything I imagine those are how people have submitted those cards to PSA rather than a PSA labelling error - in this case PSA just believed which set the submitter had assigned them as so assigned them straight into those sets.
A certain banned E4 member is quite notorious for sending in cards with incorrect details - I’ve purchased 4 Pichu cards from him in the past and all 4 I had to send in to be corrected as they were either the wrong set, wrong Pokémon or wrong version.
I was soon going to begin on parsing some PSA data. Tough with a little one at home. Do you mind telling me what you’re writing in? I plan to do this with Python. Happy to collaborate if you need the help. Apologies if this belongs in another thread or as a PM
@mosstastic I’ve done it with JavaScript (Node) but I’m a bit reluctant to share the code (as 1. it’s very messy (I haven’t intended for it to be shared with anyone) and 2. it could be modified to flood PSA with traffic, causing it to get blocked). I’m planning on releasing a tool at some point which allows for easier perusal of PSA’s population data with population changes over time. Here is an example of something I’ve been using the data for recently:
There’s still a lot of work to be done though.
Aside from description inconsistencies I mentioned above, PSA also has a lot of set inconsistencies as well:
Promo sets are usually copyright year-based, not set-based, however this itself isn’t consistent either: 1999 Promo, 2000-03 Coin Promo, 2017 SM Promo and 2017 XY Promo;
Variants often get included in one master set (1999 Pokemon Game includes unlimited, 1st edition and shadowless) and feature the variant as a description (i.e. “1st Edtiion”), but often these get separated at random (Neo Genesis has one set for unlimited and another for 1st Edition, the 1st Edition set doesn’t have “1st Edition” as a description);
Like with this thread, PSA often change things like moving cards out of sets completely and occasionally removing sets altogether.
I’m trying to normalise all of that (which is a pain in the ass) - you can see an example in that screenshot I shared above of Unlimited, 1st Edition and Shadowless being treated as separate sets. I’d like to also normalise promo sets, but the thought of that is terrifying!
I’d rather not share any code for now, but if you want to ask questions feel free to reach out.
I’m not really a developer by trade anyway so using Node knocks me out of contention to help anyway! The stuff looks pretty cool and promising. I was hoping to put together something similar and see what I can come up with. Your content display is going to be far superior than anything I output
I’m pretty new to PSA but the submission process that I’ve seen won’t even let you submit a card unless it’s already recognized. These days someone would have to submit a “Customer Research Request” with incorrect details and actually get it approved by PSA. Once it was approved by PSA, then someone would have to submit it under that incorrect label. They require a good amount of proof to get something recognized now, so I don’t think this will be as much of a problem going forward.
I’ve personally submitted many corrections to their labels so I’m slowly helping them get rid of the old incorrect labels. Hopefully we’ll reach some consistency soon, but I think this is more of a problem of the past that hasn’t been fully remedied yet and not something that continues to happen.
