Be warned, this is a tiring post...
In general, it has always been accepted that if you checked the 'no qualifiers' box on your PSA submission, your card would be returned two numbers lower (with a straight grade) than if it had a qualifier attached to it. That has always bothered the living crap out me
(okay, that's a bit too strong), because it basically deletes pertinent information.
For instance (pretend we live in a perfect world, so skip the PSA bashing here), a
PSA 9 OC graded correctly means the corners are sharp as heck, the clarity, surface and everything else is beautiful...
BUT it is off-center. Pretty straightforward.
Now, here's the huge problem to me
(and I've went on about this ad nauseum in the past, so forgive me, I have too much time on my hands today). Since the centering guidelines for a
PSA 7 and a
PSA 9 are different, how do you know what your card really is?
EXAMPLE:
You see an off-centered
PSA 7 card on eBay that looks pretty nice, but the clarity of the scans are a little weak
(which is the norm there), so you can't judge the sharpness of the corners too well. This leaves two very distinct possibilities. Either the card is a true
PSA 7 (so the centering conforms to the company's guidelines for that grade) with slight corner wear, or it shoulda/woulda/coulda been a
PSA 9 OC with sharp as a tack corners, but the 'no qualifiers' box was checked. There is absolutely no way to know which of the two it is.
This isn't a guessing game (
NO CHEATING!!), but here are 8 cards that have extremely similar
(one way, at least) centering - the top 4 are all pushed to the left with a lot of extra room at the right border, and the bottom 4 are all pushed to the bottom with a lot of extra room at the top border. Each of them suffers from the same problem - pushed too close to a border. Seven of these cards are
PSA 7s, and a single one is a
PSA 9 OC. Take a guess which one is different, or which card you would prefer to have. This isn't scientific or anything
(and you obviously can't tell enough from a simple eBay front scan of a card, and I have no idea if any of them resulted from the checking of the 'no qualifiers' box), as all of these are screengrabs that I had to resize and crop and whatnot to make compatible.
Edited to add: For anyone guessing or with a card preference, the numbers are
1, 2, 3, 4 for the top row and
5, 6, 7, 8 for the bottom row.
What complicates the matter even further (again, not scientific), is that many of these cards sell for similar amounts, which is bizarre. If the centering is virtually the same, then the
PSA 9 OC is clearly the better card - sharper corners, focus, etc., but someone would pay the same amount for a straight 7
(with the same centering), simply because it doesn't have a qualifier on the slab??
We're told that PSA is virtually eliminating qualifiers to give 'everything' a straight grade, so that's going to mess up things even more monumentally, as the old slabs mixed in with the new slabs will make telling the 'real' grade even more problematic from an eBay scan.
For instance, when I see a
PSA 5 card that is off-center, I don't think, "I guess that card was a 7, but they lowered it to a 5 due to the centering." No frickin' way!!! I say, "That card is a 5
AND it's off-center, so it's more of a 3."
To anyone still reading, congratulations!! You made it to the end of this pointless post.