Two friends and I sent in some cards we liked. Overall, it was what we expected, no big surprises. But more beautiful cards in slabs 
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I’m about to crashout. After months of submissions hovering at 65% PSA 10 rate on modern, these are my last 3 submissions that I’ve received over the last 2 weeks (all are a month + late on turnaround time):
14/31: 43%
9/24: 37%
4/25: 16%
I know grading is ultimately a crapshoot, but that last submission is especially a shot to the gut. These are pack fresh modern cards that I heavily looked over and pre-graded as strong 10 candidates 
.
I’m also aware this is the bs we agree to put up with when having a 3rd party “objectively” review cards, but I just needed to vent real quick….
Edit: I’ve had a chance to cool down and wanted to expand a bit:
The first two submissions are frustrating, but acceptable. With an average 10 rate of 60%, you would expect variance on a submission to submission basis, with some submissions being below 60%, and some being above 60%. I’ve already received the 9’s from that first submission and have looked over them. 7 of them are clear re-grades that look like near obvious 10’s (centering is better than 45/55, no edgewear, 1 or 0 small white dots on corners), and funnily enough, if those 7 would have been 10’s, I’d be in the 60-65% range…..
Its the last submission that really gets me. It’s one of those horrible submissions that exemplifies the problem that PSA is currently dealing with: With the huge increase in grading submissions, PSA has (assumingly) expanded staff and now has more over-worked and under-experienced graders than ever before. Looking through the scans, it confirms to me that the grader was either extremely harsh (card needed to be perfect, including near 50-50 centering to be a 10), or incompetent/inexperienced. As I’ve said before, I’ve crafted my pre-grading standards by reviewing my many previous submissions to understand what card condition has generally constituted both modern and vintage 10’s, so I feel well qualified to assess whether an individual submission results are out of the norm.
I would argue that right now is the second worst time to ever grade with PSA (behind when they closed during covid) due to the above mentioned staffing issues. I’d love to stop for a bit, but I’m grinding away to finally purchase a house and need the extra income from cards (that I have reliably received to this point). I have a stack of personal collection cards that I will for sure not be grading anytime soon.
Edit 2: just got another submission and went 8/31. Lololololololol this is my joker origin story.
14 Likes
I feel your pain….one of my recent bulk submissions had 20 Burgerchus…all were sealed in the pack opened by me. The current gem rate as of today is 88.3% PSA 10 (193853/219529)
I received 12/20 as PSA 10s (60%…granted the extremely small sample size). Including a PSA 6 lol. In the same order, I got an 8 Masaki Alakazam, 9 Munch Eevee and (2) 9 Munch Rowlets…was fairly happy with that…so not sure if my grader just was tired of looking at the burgerchu and was harsher or not. Sprinkled thoughout that submission though were random PSA 5s and 6s…that I’m not too sure about
Anecdotal: I structure my submissions vintage to modern.
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I’d recommend not including vintage and modern in the same submission, but usually its because of the opposite issue where vintage is graded more harshly.
It just is what it is. I really think PSA graders are under a huge time crunch and there are a ton of newbies. Pretty much every aspect (price, speed, consistency) of grading with PSA is terrible right now.
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I’m backing this up, I just got absolutely hosed on my submission. I submitted 14 cards that are all absolutely Mint 9 condition, maybe even 10 on a couple. Every. Single. One. Came back as a 7 or 8.
Copium, yes, but I have been doing this for my entire life and feel really certain that I am capable of assessing card quality within a margin of error. I obsessively go over my cards before submitting. These are mint cards.
I am done with PSA until they figure it out. I waited 3 and a half months for this.
Angry would be an understatement. PSA currently feels like a farce.
Edit: If this is a 7, there isn’t a single authentic 9 or 10 in this world. I’m gonna go splash some water on my face and cool off.
20 Likes
Peeps are making me nervous to submit my Japanese DP cards.
I have almost exclusively graded with PSA since I started collecting back in 2014. Recently I have also been feeling like PSA has been inconsistent. It’s strange because some cards get obvious flaws overlooked while others have inexplicably low grades. I don’t have data to back up my claims, but vintage cards have certainly felt a lot tougher compared to modern recently.
I regraded a couple cards I had previously sent to PSA with CGC, not everything went up but there were some pretty shocking differences. Take it with a grain of salt as it’s anecdotal but interesting.
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Wotc holos are nervous here too.
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Just got my results back for a 20 card bulk submission and I got hammered on a few as well. Got 8s on 2 Japanese VS cards that were pack fresh with no whitening at all. Even got a 7 on a Marnie trainer I pulled myself that should be a 9 because the centering is off but clean otherwise.
A few other 8s as well when I would normally expect a 9. I’ve only graded cards once before but from what I’ve bought and held I think what I submitted was easily 9 material for most cards. Somehow got a 10 on a Japanese VS metal energy though haha.
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I’m trying to be as unbiased as humanly possible, as I’m in no way a raving fanboy for any one company that just wants your money, and hopefully never will be.
That said, the conclusion I’ve come to is that as of 2026, PSA is simply not offering a quality service right now, especially not for how much you’re paying, even at the lowest tiers. Overpriced and underdelivered. No clarity, massive wait periods, a seeming lack of nuance in regards to the age of a card and the era in which it was printed. I see zero reason to submit vintage right now what with all of the misgrades I’ve seen floating around lately across various forums and subreddits.
Splashing my face off with water didn’t help, I am in such a foul mood right now. My last few submissions left me very much a fence sitter on the PSA vs. Vintage discussion, this one has put me cleanly over said fence. 
I looked at the PSA site scans of that Giratina and Deoxys, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with them outside of some vague off-centering on the Deoxys. Absurd.
9 Likes
Ya know, I’m glad I’m not the only one struggling with this right now. I wanted to bring some attention to the below sentence because it is related to something I came across when scrutinizing some of my most recent submissions:
When I reviewed the two worst submissions that I recently received (4/25 and 8/31 PSA 10’s), something stuck out to me: Only perfect or near perfectly centered cards received 10’s. To confirm this, I manually measured the centering on every single card in these two submissions. The results are as follows:
| 50/50 - 52/48 centering overall | 50/50 - 52/48 centering PSA 10 percentage | 53/47 - 55/45 centering overall | 53/47 - 55/45 centering PSA 10 percentage |
|---|---|---|---|
| 10/23 PSA 10’s | 43% | 2/30 PSA 10’s | 6.7% |
Note: PSA 10 tolerance is 55/45 centering. 2 cards in the submissions fell outside of the requirement and 1 card was not graded due to an issue with the card.
Card centering is independent of all other conditions that impact grading (edgewear, surfacewear, corner damage), so you would expect that all cards that meet the centering criteria would have similar PSA 10 rates. While it is indeed a small sample size, the data above shows a stark difference in PSA 10 rate between 50/50 - 52/48 centered cards and 53/47 - 55/45 centered cards.
I haven’t yet looked at the lesser frustrating submissions (14/31 and 9/24), but I’m wondering if they have the same trends, so I may spend a while looking at them this weekend.
I understand there is some wiggle room on centering requirements based on eye appeal, but that is usually in reference to letting cards that fall just on the cutoff of the requirements (say 56/44) still get a PSA 10. Theoretically the opposite is true (graders can give a card a 9 for centering even if it falls within requirements), but I’ve never seen any discussion of this actually occurring.
I’m wondering if PSA has once again silently tightened their centering restrictions….. I’ll be reaching out to them shortly to present some of my concerns. I don’t expect it to go anywhere, but I figure I should at least try.
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Wow, some of these are a pretty wild difference. I’ve been considering cracking some of my PSA slabs and resubmitting with CGC; this may be exactly what I needed to see to convince myself to do it
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I have also noticed this anecdotally. It seems like any visible off-centering now drops a card to a 9. I wonder if this is a consequence of PSA automating the centering measurements. Maybe the graders are shown the automated centering judgements and anything that isn’t clearly within the bounds gets rejected. I am pretty sure the automated centering judgement is pretty shit and screws over cards with irregular borders. SM is a clear example, these cards were both pack pulled by me and went straight to sleeves, so while they could have factory issues I think it is unlikely. Reshiram/Zekrom is 54/46 and Solgaleo/Lunala is 53/47 per my measurements.
My recent CGC sub also had a few cards that were in my PSA reject pile because of the centering. CGC definitely isn’t as harsh on centering as PSA, in my limited experience.
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I’m going to the do the best I can to get to the bottom of this. The way I see it, there are a few potential outcomes:
-
PSA has indeed changed their centering standards to something like 52/48, with some wiggle room up to 55/45. PSA did not inform any customers of this change and the website is inaccurate
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PSA allows for individual graders to make judgement calls on centering. The graders for my submissions had near firm requirements of 52/48. This also would mean that PSA’s website is not accurate and a 55/45 may not actually be PSA 10 quality depending on grader opinion.
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PSA’s automatic centering tool is off by up to 3% and cards with centering of 53/47 or worse are liable to be marked as 56/44 or greater.
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The graders of my submission did not follow PSA guidelines and unfairly held the cards to higher standards.
None of these outcomes are particularly good, and depending on how PSA responds, I may have to reconsider ever grading with them again. If centering requirements are not accurately listed on the website or the automated tools used by PSA are incorrect, that is potentially thousands of dollars that I have lost in grading fees for cards that never really had a good shot at a PSA 10…..
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A little bit of an aside: I always thought the standard of using one centering ratio was flawed. It overly penalizes smaller borders like those GX cards imo. I think the smaller the border is, the less any centering defect should impact eye appeal since it’s just a smaller part of the overall card and the actual “off-centering” is smaller in absolute terms. The engineer part of me thinks even if you did automated centering, you could actually have a formula that takes into account the relative size of the border to proxy more closely to what a human grader would rate as eye appeal.
I’m not sure 100% sure this is a good idea since it will be a pain to explain and less transparent. But in any case, I doubt the automated centering tools at PSA do this (but maybe I’m wrong?). So if a human isn’t taking the time to really judge eye appeal these small border cards will all get unfairly graded…
Could there be a chance that they’re tightening their requirements because of the acquisition of BGS?
I do not grade much vintage at all but I have found that they are much harsher on vintage now compared to what is already slabbed and compared to modern.
For modern, I fully believe that they have gotten stricter on centering but I also do not measure the cards I send in. I have found my modern cards fall into three categories:
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good centering no whitening = 10
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centering slightly off or has a tiny white dot = 9
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centering off and has tiny white dot = 8
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