PSA Card Guarantee

[steve B]

Originally Posted by Snowman

It really is silly that they ever offered any sort of a guarantee whatsoever, to begin with. You'd think they would just accept the fact that they are unable to detect most alterations by this point and just get rid of their guarantee program. It really is pointless. They should just be upfront and honest about what they can and cannot do and simply admit that their grades just represent a particular grader's opinion on a particular day and that there is a very wide range of expectations when sending in cards for grading.

I'd love to see a hobby "secret shopper" like the apparel and restaurant industries have where a mix of altered and unaltered cards are sent to every grading company and statistical reports get published with their results, showing each company's Type I and Type II errors (TPG said a card was not altered when it was, and TPG said a card was altered when it was not). I'd place my bets on SGC being by far the most accurate.

I wouldn't be so sure.

And how would you count rejections based on how giving a deserving card a number grade? Of my three rejects,
1 "miscut top and bottom" Very rough cut, factory but not at all typical.
2 "Min size" also factory, and the difference in height was less than the difference in width on another card in the same submission. I suspect the narrow card - a non AB T206 that's very near as narrow as my AB backs got through while the short one didn't because the size they use for width accounts for AB, but the height is more strict.
3 Trimmed all four sides. Totally blew it including that one as I delayed then rushed to pick a card to make the minimum number for that special. It is trimmed.

I get that the first two would probably look "bad" to someone who doesn't know what a factory edge looks like, so they wouldn't give it a number. I got the explanations by requesting not to holder as "A"