Cards with a lighter background have more difficulty in achieving PSA 10 grades due to similarities with the yellow border surrounding each Pokemon card.
Thoughts:
I do not know how PSA measures or verifies borders for centering considerations. Whether it’s by eye or machine, it seems reasonable that borders blend easier when closer in color. A person could quickly see something as off center when judging at a glance. A machine could confuse when a border begins and ends depending on the programming or when other features on the card begin.
A main example of this is Dark Magneton. This is a frustrating card that’s typically off center out of the pack. Even perfect cards with strong centering receive 9s.
Another note & possibly a side topic - what if PSA recently upgraded equipment or retrained employees on centering qualifications. Could this justify an uptick in populations for cards that typically do not pull 10s due to centering issues? There are numerous examples of late, although the data is likely skewed with higher volumes of cards being graded/regraded.
What do you all think? Unfounded claims or rationally viable?
A lot of people freaked out when PSA posted this picture to their instagram about how they measure for centering. They ended up removing the post I believe.
unless psa is scanning each card and having a computer count the pixels on each border its not as accurate as it can be.
I think with psa’s resources it could be easy to get small scanners with a program to calculate true borders.
I don’t know how many people at PSA do the grading, but if you consider how many cards they get I can’t imagine they have a lot of time to scan cards. Actually I’m certain they don’t; I’ve sent cards that technically were within the limit for the front border, but looked off and were given 9s. (I’m assuming they would have gotten 10s otherwise, but obviously that’s not necessarily the case.
So if it’s all about eye appeal, then it makes sense that cards which don’t have borders that stand out as much may be easier to grade. But I can’t imagine it’s a hugely significant effect.
your experience is like an anomaly. I’ve seen people come into it like you, including myself, with thousands of dollars to spend on boxes and get great grades in the beginning. later on to only get a lower psa 10 rate. Unless you are doing new PSA/CC memberships each time you submit.
Are you implying that PSA purposely lowers their members return rates after a certain amount of submissions? You brought into question creating new PSA memberships for each submission, which is why I ask.
I’m not saying they lower it. Ive just noticed a trend in the last 6 years.
about 2 years ago, the number of 10s dropped off.
Looking at my data I went from about 40-60% psa 10 rate on english
to about 15-20%.
I notice that around the holidays the grades are pretty good.
Often times my membership 15 card one is better than my others.
that could be because most people send their “best” on the CC.
I honestly can’t tell the difference between 9 and 10s in english
ungraded cards. psa is still accurate if 80-90% of the time they
give out grades that are at what you expect or 1 below/higher.
Considering a lot of concerns about psa is that 1 grade difference, which
is worth potentially 10x the amount of a 9. Those concerns are usually
the subjective part of the grading. The subjective part i am talking about
is how much does a nick take away, I’ve gotten 10s with one white corner,
but 9s with none? Without using a machine to look at centering how accurate
is the eyeball? Its probably accurate 50-60% of the time.
I just had a crazy thought.
This would make an amazing study.
You took pokemon cards and measured them in a scanner/counting the dots.
you then ask people to eye ball the card’s centering. If the card is in
the requirements for 10. I wonder if we did this with normal people,
experienced graders, and former graders. Look at the data to see just how
accurate psa graders are with subjective grading.
I doubt i would do this and publish because im sure PSA/BGS would likely sue.
In all honesty it would be fun to do with already graded cards to see what people
think the grades are and compare each group. See how accurate people are.
Interesting…I have never actually tracked data on my ratios. I may look into inputting the numbers when I have the time.
I have mountains of 9s, I wouldn’t say my ratios are any better than anyone else. I do a ton of submissions…. However, I don’t put all of my eggs in one basket. If I have a submission of say 100 cards I usually will split it into 3 or 4 different orders. Of course I will never truly know is this helps at all, but it makes me feel a bit more safe guarded against those 1 or 2 guys that 9 everything.
I do notice the electric yellow cards coming back 10’s much more often though. Maybe a few of us can compile some data on it. We have the submission records just need to sift through it.
Not to be an asshole, but my opinion is that you could come up with a million “grading theories” based on logic like this. You could argue the exact opposite based on the same logic. Unless there is some kind of empirical evidence (which would be near-impossible to source let alone determine causation) then these claims are unfounded speculation.
Everyone is going to notice certain trends in their cards, but the truth is that given the volume of cards PSA processes, statistical anomalies are bound to occur and will even out. To study this with any certainty would be extremely difficult.
When you start grading cards with PSA I am sure you will look more thouroughly over your cards as opposed to your 405th submission, that is why it seems more get 10s in the “olden days”.
Only an extremely small percentage of a cards total population is sent into PSA (talking main sets) therefore the POP is not a true indicator of how hard a card seems to grade IMO. Take for example the Gold Star dog guy who had like 20 million of each card, the price for those otherwise valuable gold stars is like $60/70 for a PSA 10 which is crazy compared to other English Gold stars in 10.
Less than 150 Dark Magnetons have been graded achieving a PSA 9 or 10 specifically 23% of that number are PSA 10s that is not crazy to me and actually seems quite good for an English card.
Dark Magneton was much lower 2 years ago. I’d previously submitting 5 at a time to receive 8s/9s alongside other Team Rocket cards of similar quality pulling 10s. Recently the 10 pop spiked. I’m not sure how this correlates to other Rocket 10s though.
It was a long shot argument. Perhaps it would be more fitting to simply reference centering versus “lighter cards”. To reiterate, I’m not sure how PSA justifies centering. I hop it’s not a ruler on a card, but if it is a subjective measure it could make sense that cards that are usually more off center take a beating more often. Maybe PSA stores notes on each card that appears when grading… Ex: typically off center; no jungle symbol; missing HP.
I would agree the electric cards make it more difficult to see the border. Similar to the new back japanese cards make it more difficult to see damage.
Also, in relation to other posts in this thread, I think @shizzlemetimbers hit the nail on the head for all PSA/Pokemon discussions. When you are heavily invested in something, you microscopically analyze every detail, literally; talking about machines scanning every dot. I think it is best to keep most things in life at a safe distance, otherwise one ends up becoming obsessed. This is coming from a guy who interacts with pokemon and psa on a level most do not. As much as we desire, there are not always 100% quantifiable patterns and correlations.
