Help? Tell me why one card is a PSA 8 and the other is a 10?

[philliesphan]

Cool that you are collecting Mike Schmidt!

For many years, I owned perhaps the largest collection of PSA 10 Mike Schmidt cards in the hobby. Alas, I have moved on with my collecting interests, but still own many of my rarer/cooler Schmidt cards.

As a pro tip, I'd say really spend time with cards if you want to know the difference between a PSA 8, PSA 9 and PSA 10. You can't eyeball this stuff from a scan and be able to tell with a high degree of confidence.

Back in the day, I probably owned 15,000+ Mike Schmidt raw cards. I promise you, if you want to really get in the head of a grade, buy yourself a raw lot of a few hundred Mike Schmidt cards. This wouldn't be an expensive proposition with something like 1988 Donruss, for example.

If you look through them raw, one-by-one, under a high-powered lamp, you can quickly get the feel for differentiating between grades due to corner touches, centering and surface blemishes. I feel like with a stack of raw cards, I can tell between PSA 8 and PSA 10 quality cards 95% of the time. I think there's also a bright line between PSA 9 and PSA 7 cards. It is true that there is some fuzziness between ±1 grade. I could never consistently tell between raw cards I submitted that came back as PSA 9 and those that came back PSA 10. Sometimes the cards I submitted that came back 10 I thought were only MINT, and vice versa. But with enough practice, you should be able to differentiate between two grading levels, and from there it is a matter of practice and perhaps a second or third pass on card-by-card review (louping the corners for instance)

Good luck!

[Beastmode]

The main difference between these two cards was the 10 was submitted by a bulk submitter, and the 8 was submitted as a one-off, or small lot. Hearing these explanations for the physical differences is comical. IMO, if your going to submit post '77 cards, submit 100's at a time, not 10.