I am wondering if someone more experienced can chime in here. For cards that are low pop because of difficulty to grade. Do you think there’s an inherit bias for graders to not give it a 10? I mean grading is subjective after all.
And if you were grading a card with such a large price difference. It just seems to steer on the side of caution, giving it a 9 would just be safer.
To my knowledge the graders typically are not Pokemon experts who know everything about the hobby. They don’t know which cards are hard to grade, they don’t know the value of the cards.
They do have access to the POP report though, and they can research the value.
You think with a million+ backlog they will check every pop for every single card and then research value? Lol. They don’t give a crap if you send them a first Ed t17 or a modern Japanese card.
Given the number of submissions they receive, if you assume they have 50 graders and they are working full time with no breaks they are literally looking at each card something on the order of seconds just to get to break even before they start chipping away at their backlog.
These are also people that are handling literally the rarest trading cards across all hobbies in the non-bulk orders. I think there could be a case made for the handful of most recognizable cards (ie. base charizord) but overall I think you’re really overestimating how much the graders are going to care about a few hundred or thousand dollars or even the possible bandwidth they can afford to care given how busy they are.
If you think they will not care if the card they are grading is a 1st ed zord or a random japanese moden common, then I have nothing to add, you are very much mistaken. Grading services cannot be unbiased, and cannot quickly and even sloppily grade high value cards whether you want to believe it or not.
Sounds like you have concrete evidence besides your own opinion? Please show and educate us. If this is true, grading in a whole would be worthless.
A PSA 10 will get a PSA 10 if it’s of PSA 10 quality, I am not saying it will not.
I am saying a valuable card will get way more attention than a random common.
No concrete evidence, just common sense.
Since we do not know that inner workings of PSA, can you be sure they are unbiased even with bulk orders, even if they claim to be?
If you submit a 5-figure card in the appropriate service it might get more attention than a bulk card, sure. These guys have 0 idea what low pop cards sell for, they are grading nonstop, all kinds of different tcgs. They might very well recognize a first ed Charizard, does that mean they will grade it differently? No.
I would have to agree with ash. Or at least I really hope what he is saying is true.
Because if you guys are saying theses are minimums wage graders that don’t know anything about pokemon and are subjectively grading multiple cards per minute. Then it sounds a bit like a diaster in the making.
Something is going to go wrong if they are having highschool students determine whether a card is 50 buck or a few thousand. That’s the price difference between a 9 and a 10 in some cases. So there better be reliable standard. And one that people and the market trust. The fact that some people think they don’t really care because of the backlog is already a bit troubling.
To be honest, I am a little worried of them decreasing their grading prices. If anything the price of their service should be increasing along with the quality of their services.
There seems to be a moral hazard here where once a card is graded, PSA doesnt care about the value of the card because they already made their money. And as all the cards worth grading is already graded, they are incentivized to lower their prices to make it more feasible to grade lower value cards and in turn cut the quality of the grading in order to make money. And if the grading quality becomes less and less reliable it’ll hurt the entire market.
I respect your opinion, but I do think a first ed zard will get graded more harshly if it ends up in a bulk order amongst commons, even if that destroys the PSA narrative of them being subjective and giving the same attention to every card.
That’s exactly my trick to getting more PSA 10’s than PSA 9’s. Bulk submission for the win. Yup I believe the Charizard is the only card they most likely know since it’s the most popular card in the game. I submitted a BGS 9.5 Quad 1st edition shadowless Charizard to PSA for crossover to PSA 10 and they immediately shipped it back same day. They want to keep the pop as small as possible for Charizard 1st ed. I bet the Japanese tournament prize card would have 0 bias if it was sent in bulk submission. Don’t think they have time to research a kids game 
Is there any actual evidence to support the PSA pop control theory? Or is it just belief based on personal experience? Genuinely interested to know as I’ve heard it mentioned a lot.
Based on the figures/pop ratios of a lot of different popular cards, including WOTC charizards, I don’t see any clear trends which suggest they are graded harshly, but I don’t have significant personal experience to go by.
Surely it also has to be considered that the ratios are likely skewed by how many 9s are cracked and re-submitted for higher value cards. So where there are 120 PSA 10 1st ed zards and 632 PSA 9s,that 632 is likely to be significantly lower, making the ratio a lot kinder?
It’s complete nonsense.
No. As others have said, PSA conspiracy theories are generally nonsense.
You know the real reason certain cards are much harder to grade than others? Because those hard-to-grade cards are more likely to have visible print lines, scratches, or other defects. That’s pretty much it.
And for the sets that have population growth slow, you can pretty much always tie this to the price of the sealed product becoming too expensive to open (without taking a significant financial loss).
Well that’s why some people dislikes the whole PSA grading and there are wide inconsistencies with their grading, sometimes there are 8’s that look closer to a 10 and sometimes 10 that look like a 8. Also you got all this nonsense of “weak 9”, “strong 9”. Thing is there arent services like this, this is like the “industry standard” whatever that means but the moment something more coherent and consistent is available, then we might jump into that.
So yeah, it might be a hard to swallow pill that your ungraded $xxx card jumped to $xxxxx because a minimum wage worker determined it was a “10”.
@fresco No one is saying that PSA grading is perfect. As I’ve said before, because PSA only grades in whole numbers there’s always going to be a very subjective question of what to do with cards that are right in the middle of a 9 or 10 or right in the middle of an 8 or 9, etc. Even if PSA was PERFECT (which no one is arguing their graders are) you would still have some strong 9s that look essentially the same as some weak 10s, etc.
Having said that, as someone who owns a lot of 10s and 9s, as an overall group there is a very obvious difference between 10s and 9s to me. The 9s generally have much more obvious flaws. But sure, there will always be a ton of examples to cherry-pick that make it seem like PSA is clueless.
My point is, grading is extremely subjective and i think it will be at least in the foreseeable future. Those grades are assigned by minimum wage workers. As long as the grades are determined by them, then the hobby will keep using “ambigous” grades and we have to deal with it because that’s the way it is.
Unless we get something new with ultra rigid guidelines and super consistent grades (PSA might get there in the future) we are bound to cherry picking and using those weird terms such as strong or weak.
The only long-term solution I see is for PSA to let the computer do it. Or at least do most of it. Invest in some AI software or something. If they got like a million cards backlogged, maybe they do that.
Doesn’t PSA research the value of the card after grading to charge the customer appropriately?And doesn’t this go totally against pop control? I distinctly remember this topic in one of esssmmmpratte’s videos…
I just honestly believe the workers do not have a vested interest in the grade and/or population of the cards… I’m sure it’s an assembly line of graders just grading the cards and when work gets repetitive, mistakes, complacency and lack of attention to detail is bound to happen…