[boneheadandrube]

I prefer to pay less for the same card in a holder that looks better to me. The key is you have to be able to judge condition on your own and purchase the card instead of the holder.

Its true that when you go to sell it could be for less, but you paid less in the first place. I guess its hard for some to understand that and buyers premiums?

If you are buying raw and submitting for profit, then sure send to PSA. The problem I have with sending to them is they are terribly inconsistent with pre war cards. It seems like 10-20% of every submission I make gets graded inaccurately. How do I come to that conclusion? Because when I resubmit those cards two months later they get different grades again, and if I send them two months after that some will get the same grades they did the first time and some will get new ones altogether. I have seen T206's go from Altered to 6, N5 to 5.5 and vice versa over and over.

I think as a business its not in their best interest to get the grades on discontinued cards exactly right the first time, they'll never see it again. They have to be aware that people en masse just resubmit cards if they don't like the grades, so why fix the consistency problem? In fact, how about a couple of times a year they should rotate graders from newer Pokemon non sport and the like into older baseball cards just to make it 25%. That would never happen...

To me SGC is much more consistent with pre war and there isn't a premium for popularity. If you can determine which cards you want without relying on the holder to tell you, you can spend less on the same thing.

*It seems like there is more discussion about the monetary aspects of cards in PSA holders than the actual attributes of the cards themselves..unless they are obviously altered.