The National: Is 4 hrs. enough on Wednesday?
 

First-time attendee question: The non-VIP hours for the Wednesday sneak peak are 4-8 p.m. Is this enough time to see all the vintage tables, or am I better off going on Thursday? Is everyone already set up by this time, or are some still rolling in?

I'm going again on Saturday (mostly for one autograph signing), but want to catch an early day as well since it seems that day is a mad house.

Wednesday
 

If you have a set agenda of what you are looking for then Wednesday is not bad. Most of the bigger dealers are headed in earlier in the week and set up on Tuesday. The smaller dealers will be getting ready and maybe not as "welcome" to negotiating as they need to get set up.

I think you'll find 4 hours woefully inadequate.

I walked the whole 2022 national in about 3 hours pretty easily. I glance at tables and instantly know if I want to stop or not. I only went to find cool rare stuff and 90% of tables were glance, and skip. So that definitely helped.

It really depends what you're going for.. If it's for one of the same 40 cards every vintage dealer has 10 of it might take a full day. Eg koufax rookie, mantles Aarons etc.

Thanks for the assessment -- I'm primarily looking for Jim Thorpe, so that's pretty narrow.

If that's all you're looking for, you won't even need the 4 hours. In and out in less than two, I surmise.

I only sought vintage autographs when I used to attend, so was in a similar sort of timeframe. As the previous poster said, it took a nanosecond to tell if a table was worth stopping at or not.

It depends on what you are looking for. If what you're looking for are just Jim Thorpe cards, then you should be able to go thru all the tables fairly quickly.

That's my intended mission ... but that could always be swayed due to rare eye candy.

I would say if you are looking for Jim Thorpe, you'll need MORE time, not less. You will need to stop and look for that needle in a haystack at every vintage table. And you absolutely can't stop and look at every vintage table in one day. There will be literally hundreds of vintage tables. If you even stop to dig through cards at a fraction of them, it will be many hours. I was looking for very rare 90s cards last year, which are super easy to spot from a distance. So I could mostly just scan the tables and it took 2 full days to see it all. 2 years ago I only wanted one specific card: 1967 Tom Seaver. It's a card that dozens of dealers had. But it took a full day to see them all and narrow it down to the one I want.

It could be enough time, depends on the kind of shape you are in / how quickly you want to navigate / be aggressive as far as getting the attention of dealers. Also depends on how crowded it will be. You might want to play it safe and give yourself more time. To go all the way out there, you don’t want to have any regrets or thoughts that you might have missed something.

Pretty easy to identify whose selling vintage and not the shiny recent stuff.

No.

Not at all. I have a very unique focus and you need to look at every booth including a quick once over of the modern booths because they could have someone in the corner of a showcase.

If you want to not feel rushed as you look Ithink 4 hours is not enough time. Also keep in mind you may encounter a line to enter so you may not actually have 4 hours.

That does nothing but cut the show in half. Now all he has to do is look closely at around 500 tables for a needle in a haystack. He'll need all day....at least.

I can't get through a single table at a show in four hours, because I'm too busy talking people up and looking for cool cardboard adventures.

The more time you're able to give yourself, the better. Being overly rushed is not the way to go at these things.