Do PSA slabs *really* sell for more than SGC?

[Snowman]

Originally Posted by Gorditadogg

Anybody can look at a card and see if it is centered. There is no reason to have centering as a factor in deciding a card's grade. Other than the people who say they only collect cards with no qualifiers, what use is it for a grader to say a card is off-center or extra well-centered. Any straight-on pic can tell you that.

I would rather have a well-centered 6 than a 70/30 7, but if SGC is going to bump a card with 6 corners to a 7 because it is 50/50 centered, then that doesn't help me, it just confuses the grade more. Now I have to decide whether it is a bumped up 6 or a true 7.

The same is true of most flaws though. Anyone can see excess print lines, poor registration, lack of color depth, wax stains, rounded corners, etc. Yet these all come into play in the grading process. I don't see why centering should be any different, especially when it is hands down the number one factor that collectors care most about. It shows you how well the card was printed/cut at the factory.

The whole point of having a ranking system in the grading process is to establish a hierarchy for each card's desirability based on it's appearance. The TPGs have largely failed us in this regard. Especially with respect to the attention paid to corners. As a specific example, the difference in the corner standards between a PSA 6 and a PSA 7 today, with their newly established goalposts, is entirely imaginary. What makes a PSA 6 a better card than a PSA 7 has absolutely nothing to do with the corners whatsoever, yet PSA wants to pretend that it does. Eye-appeal matters to everyone and that should be reflected in a card's grade.

Exactly how to evaluate eye appeal could be debated, but at least SGC makes honest attempts to do this. I probably get more half-grades with my PC cards at SGC than I do full grades because of it. And I almost never get half grades at PSA, and when I do encounter them on the marketplace, they're usually OC cards with horrible eye appeal.

Should SGC give full 1 point grade bumps for cards with 50/50 centering and otherwise perfect eye-appeal for the grade level? I don't know. And I'm not sure they'd agree with my claim that I think they sometimes do, but I'm OK with it. A dead-centered "VG" card with no creases and great color & registration with just some honest corner wear should (and will) absolutely outsell a "VG-EX" card with a crease, 80/20 centering, a print line, and square corners. The grading process should reflect that.

The fact that 3s regularly outsell 4s, and sometimes even 4s outsell 6s in the same auctions side-by-side, should be an embarrassment to the TPGs. But it's probably too late to change things now (though that clearly hasn't stopped them from moving the goalposts multiple times already).