Crack And Re-Submit Or Review Service?

Mefer

Greetings All--

I have gone on record before in saying that I am not a big fan of the PSA review service. Though my studies are far from scientific, my cursory review of the postings of others, combined with my one very small review service submission, leads me to conclude that a submitter is looking at best at a 15 to 20 percent success rate on review service. Never mind the fact that many who submit under the review service cull through countless cards (myself included) to arrive at a pristine number for review (obviously PSA does not know this). At the end of the day, unless you are talking about very high value cards, there is not a lot of value added given those ratios.

The other option is to crack and resubmit. I have had better success going this route in the past; again based on my rather very small sampling size, I have improved my grades about 75% of the time. Of course, there are risks involved here-- namely, damage to the card during the removal process. To do it right, and lessen the chance of damage, the process is also very time consuming especially if you have cards of any number.

This leads me to my current conundrum-- I culled from my collection about 20 cards I feel are undergraded by .5 or more. None are highly valuable and consist of mainly commons in a set I am working on. It is, nonetheless, frustrating to see these cards I feel, upon close inspection, to reside in lower graded holders.

Given the number of cards involved, I am now pretty much turned off to the laborious effort of cracking and resubmitting. On the other hand, I do not feel I will get the value added through the review service as it now stands considering I bet donuts to dollars I would hit no better than improvement on four cards (or in other words, 20%).

What is a boy to do? After writing all of this down and thinking it through further, I may just be better off keeping them under graded given all the variables. Thoughts?

Matt

Mickey71

I think we almost share the same thinking. I sent in 14 cards on review this last time. They .5 bumped 3. The weirdest part of the whole thing is that 2 of the 3 that bumped were the 2 least likely to bump. They were nice cards just not the cream of the crop. From my 4 small review subs; forget the whole centering thing--send in cards with razor corners==this is what they're looking for in 8.5's. I will send in some more, just not right now. The biggest fear for people cracking out cards is EOT. I'm just going to say it--the graders are guessing in this area. There is no exact science in recognizing trimmed cards--only blatantly obvious ones.

Mickey71

cougar701

My last sub was a demonstration to me that they have found a simple AND effective way to minimize the guess work of the EOT's..

They are returning ANY card that does not fill the holder. This way they don't have to worry about an precision trim job getting slabbed with 9's and 10's, they call it N6 Minimum Size Requirement defects. I got 6 cards returned to me of 106 cards subbed total. The obvious pain point here is, the cards were not trimmed at all and were indeed slightly smaller then regular issues...but from the factory. Frustrating for the legit collector and the legit unaltered card directly out of a pack, but I think at the end of the day, it deters the alteration specialists out there to even try to sub a card to PSA.

It is best for the future of PSA's reputation and overall values of cards in PSA holders versus everyone else.


For the record, I think cracking the card and taking the chance is worth far more then a review of the card slabbed. Simply be sure it is a card that filled the holder before and you wont have anything to worry about with the EOT or Min SIze Req. I think you get a fairer shake when they think they are grading it for the first time and not stepping on a previous grader's toes.

JMDVM

I have had better luck cracking and resubmitting than review but I have had crazy results too. I recently cracked a 67 Agee PSA 8ST in order to remove the wax, and it came back "MinSize". Another time I had a 71 Pat Fischer that went from a 7 to a "trimmed". I agree,they can't tell with any certainty, its a guessing game. I never crack out graded cards from other companies. I always use the "crossover" option and place "minimum grade" on them. If they think the card is trimmed they will tell you and if the card doesn't meet your minimum grade, they will tell you that too. I would say I'm successfully crossing over 65-70% but I'm really strict about what I send in.