I think that if you ever try this you would stand a better chance at crossing it to a higher grade cracked out of the slab than inside the existing slab no matter who is grading it. It takes away that initial grading bias because it seems that they all want to have the ‘strongest’ grading possible. The thing is, a 9.5 is Gem Mint from CGC & BGS while a PSA 10 is also a Gem Mint. I almost always expect my PSA 10s to have some minor flaw and I usually view them as ‘strong’ 9.5s and never as Pristine. In fact, only 1 or 2 of my PSA 10s I feel could ever get a BGS or CGC 10 with my own subjective opinion. The rest would undoubtedly be 9.5s if sent to BGS or CGC (strong ones at that).
So, ultimately it’s a risk you could take. One thing you could do is send in the card to attempt to cross-grade it and get the cross-grade report back if it doesn’t meet criteria for Pristine. This way they could point out any possible flaws that you aren’t seeing now and you wouldn’t risk losing your existing grade/slab.
The issue you run into via this method is if it does not cross to what you want there is no guarantee the card will get the same original grade again. Agree with all of your points though.
Huh, that’s really cool. If those figures are accurate it means Pokémon makes up around 18.3% of all the cards PSA grades (33,913 (PokéMetrics) out of 185,164 (Gem Rate) in the past week). Shows just how small Pokémon is compared to sports.
I’d take their daily stats with a pinch of salt though - I’ve had cards back from PSA before they’ve even shown up on the pop report in the past, and I live in the UK. That’s the primary reason I stick to weekly with PokéMetrics.
Hello, I have a question about PSA.
I see many cards recently graded through the express service have the certification number 63XXXXXX.
I was watching PSA return on youtube with turnaround times over a year, these cards have the certification number 52XXXXXX:
What that means?
1-PSA have already graded all the cards in backlog and just need encapsulated them and this is the longest process.
2-PSA left empty these certification range number for all the backlog cards.
3-Other possibility.
I started collecting this year, sorry for my ignorance if it’s a dumb question.
@yamahap45 PSA assign certification numbers to cards as they register them into their system, not when the card is graded. Basically the first package PSA open will contain lower certificate numbers, regardless of tier level.
You should never pay a premium on brand new set cards if people are calling them the “first graded”, as whilst they may have been the first to appear on the pop report there’s a very good chance they weren’t the first cards PSA came across.
I’d estimate PSA currently has at least 8 million cards in their backlog, which is why the certification numbers are so extreme (52XX vs 63XX).
This happened with me and someone else on E4 recently. I submitted a card as bulk back in May 2020 and they submitted it at a higher tier some time around January-February 2021. They got their card back at the end of May 2021 with a 61XX cert, whereas I got mine back 2 weeks later with a 48XX cert. Theirs was graded first as it was submitted at a higher tier, but mine was registered into PSA’s system months before they’d even submitted their card.
To be clear on the Ludkins thing: PSA redefined tiers after they were submitted on. “Dealer Bulk” was never a submission tier. During the PSA special last summer, it was on the system as “45-Day.” PSA later changed this to “TCG Value” to align with the other tiers they compressed into a general bulk: including retroactively for orders already submitted. So the way things panned out over the last 18 months was 100% not because it was maliciously advertised or submitted wrong on Ludkins’ part. It’s just how PSA responded to their crippling demand. They took everything under a certain income threshold for themselves and said “Fuck it, it’s going in the slow pile.” There was never any offer of compensation at any point even when different price points were paid. Rather, the terms were updated to more clearly specify that there would not be compensation.
Last quote was a $100 tier end of year. It was not a promise, not guaranteed to only be $100, not specified what speed that was, etc. But that’s the floating rumor as I’ve heard it.
This has probably been answered before, but when looking at the “complete through” dates at PSA, which tier would apply to a Ludkins submission? I sent them back in February, probably whatever the cheapest option was, not express or anything.
Which for the record is in October right now, so Ludkins/Graded Gem submissions are probably in the July 2020 timeframe. I’m not expecting my December submission back until sometime next spring, personally. If it gets here earlier, awesome.
The real answer? None of them. PSA only lists “retail” tiers. That is to say: After they made all of these changes during the shutdown, they coined the term “retail submission” as a way of differentiating their public, direct submissions from submissions through their official partners. This distinction never existed before in a public capacity and deals in the past were written individually and predicated upon volume/length of the agreement.
PSA has shifted focus multiple times throughout the shutdown period. For several months, they were only really focused on catching up the 20-day submissions that were pushing a year. Right now, we are seeing a lot of movement on the oldest “Value TCG” submissions. But it is not possible to know at any given time when PSA is working on a different part of their backlog except as conjecture based on what large submitters are seeing. And that data is hazy at best.
I would not recommend using the complete through dates to guide you through understanding the current priorities that PSA is working on. Especially on submissions made through official partners. At some point, PSA changed the way they treat these submissions. This was a purely internal decision with no public announcement ever made and without respect to any way things were treated in the past.
I would give it 6-12 more months before really trying to anticipate turnaround times with PSA. That’s my personal estimate on how long it will take to start to see something resembling patterns and meaningfully reduce the backlog to a functional point.