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Posted By: warshawlaw

We went to shows and bought only those cards we could handle is what we did.

Given everything I’ve seen and said here and in articles I've written, you might think I am against slabbing. I am not. To me it has a number of profoundly useful purposes:

1. Raising sales prices. I first got interested in slabbing cards for resale. Before it got passe, slabbing was like minting money. I could buy collections at fractions of the raw Beckett price, send them into PSA, and it was like hitting the Lotto when a card that I bought for 75% of Beckett's near mint price came back an 8 or a 9 and could be flipped for several times what I paid for it. Talk about leveraging trades . . .

2. Bringing some level of consistency to mail order. Before slabbing I got ****ed regularly on mail order purchases, which is why I basically stopped making them for a couple of years. I probably returned three out of every four lots I bought. I have had one complaint with a graded card, and it was a piece of **** from PRO that I bought against my better judgment. I have yet to have one of the ubiquitous gross condition blows (such as the creased near mint card) that I seemed to buy every damn time.

3. Insurance: Ever had your cards stolen or damaged by a disaster? I have, and it sucks, which is why I now pay the "vig" and insure my collection. If I am ever forced to prove up the content and quality of my collection with the insurer (a realistic possibility here in earthquake country), I like my chances in court a lot better with a list of graded cards with serial numbers.

4. I like the display that SGC slabs make for the cards, especially the N and T cards. Heck, I just spent $10 to grade my N266 type card even though I knew it was only in "good" condition and won't sell it, just to have it in a slab with a nice label that I could display.

5. Sometimes I am just stumped as to how to grade a particular card and having a relatively cheap third party opinion can really help. For example, I never know how to grade a card with a "chip" in a leaf finish, like the edge of a T205, or what to do for minor reverse paper loss on an N card. For $10 I can get a decent second opinion.

My bottom line is that if I do not feel 100% comfortable with the card as graded, I turn it down or send it back. As a lay expert in the field, the odds are that if the card does not seem right to me, it is no good. The grading services could go a long way to increasing their credibility by voluntarily taking responsibility for their own actions. How about a straightforward money back guarantee that if the card they grade is fake or altered, the service will buy it back from the victimized collector? SGC made that offer to Keith Olbermann and PSA did it for Andy Baran's fake Ruth rookie.