How accurate are population reports?

[Bosox Blair]

Aside from the crack/resubmits and the large number of raw cards out there, no TPG is very good about variations. I've seen many, many problems in this regard. The pop reports are a terrible way to judge scarcity of variations.

As for PSA, for years and years they did not track the backs of T206. So for back collectors, using a PSA pop report is just foolish.

I collect C60 Lacrosse cards. These are pretty tough cards. The later set C59 (which looks very much like C60 from the front - different back) is not as scarce or valuable. I just saw on Ebay a bunch of C59 cards slabbed by PSA and identified as C60s. Now these C60s are low-pop cards according to PSA...5 to 10 graded each subject. But clearly some of those pop numbers are inaccurate. Leaves you to wonder exactly how many others are wrongly recorded in their pop report...

Summary - there are lots of problems with these things, and you should never bank on them.

Cheers,
Blair