Argument for why Tobacco insert cards cannot realistically be Grades of 8 or 9

[benjulmag]

Here are the facts as I see them (in no particular order).

1. At the card shows of yesterday one very rarely saw a T206 that by today's standards would grade close to a real 8.
2. For a card to grade 8 or higher, assuming it was not damaged while in the pack, it would need to be gingerly removed from the pack and subsequently treated with tremendous care and essentially never handled.
3. There are very few oversized cards today compared with yesteryear.
4. The incremental increase in price from converting a 5 or 6 to an 8 or higher is staggering.
5. There is a significant population of known card doctors.
6. PSA spends very little time examining cards, which examinations are done with unsophisticated methods and in many instances performed by inexperienced graders.
7. When I blow up T206s graded 8 or higher from an online catalog that allows high resolution examination, I can literally see on a majority of them cardboard shavings and/or uneven borders/edges.

One of my father's favorite sayings was when one sees a hoofmark on a trail in the woods, expect to find a horse, not a zebra.

Applying that saying to the issue at hand, IMHO;

horse -- the great majority of T206 8's or higher are altered
zebra -- they are unaltered

[darwinbulldog]

What percentage of T206s survived at all? I believe the total production numbers were in the hundreds of millions, right? So what we're seeing is approximately 1 out of every 1 million manufactured T206s currently residing in a PSA 9 or 10 slab. I would have expected the number to be a little higher than that actually, but surely some of those cards were altered. Still, it would be more surprising to me if significantly less than 0.0001% of cards as sturdy as T206s had legitimately survived in 9+ condition for 110 years than if just a few hundred of them did. I imagine if you dumped a million new T206s off the roof of Factory 30, a few hundred of them would still be in mint condition.

[drcy]

Originally Posted by benjulmag

Here are the facts as I see them (in no particular order).

1. At the card shows of yesterday one very rarely saw a T206 that by today's standards would grade close to a real 8.
2. For a card to grade 8 or higher, assuming it was not damaged while in the pack, it would need to be gingerly removed from the pack and subsequently treated with tremendous care and essentially never handled.
3. The are very few oversized cards today compared with yesteryear.
4. The incremental increase in price from converting a 5 or 6 to an 8 or higher is staggering.
5. There is a significant population of known card doctors.
6. PSA spends very little time examining cards, which examinations are done with unsophisticated methods and in many instances performed by inexperienced graders.
7. When I blow up T206s graded 8 or higher from an online catalog that allows high resolution examination, I can literally see on a majority of them cardboard shavings and/or uneven borders/edges.

One of my father's favorite sayings was when one sees a hoofmark on a trail in the woods, expect to find a horse, not a zebra.

Applying that saying to the issue at hand, IMHO;

horse -- the great majority of T206 8's or higher are altered
zebra -- they are unaltered

Of course proof and evidence are important, but, in the hobby, so are common sense. Most do, but some collectors lack it.