PSA Grading: 5 Steps to Prep Your Cards for PSA in 2021! 📦💰

today on sports card investor the five steps you need to take to submit cards for grading and i brought in an expert to give us the inside scoop [Applause] [Music] hello sports card investors and welcome to a very special episode we are going to get you ready with everything you need to know about how to prep your cards for psa grading and then how to submit them in fact this is going to be a two-part series where we're going to dive in deep and get you ready to do this and i have brought in a true grading expert to help give us the inside scoop today joe davis from gotbaseballcards.com welcome joe thank you jeff it's great to be with you looking forward to helping out all of your customers absolutely joe's shop here in atlanta submits thousands and thousands of cards for grading to psa every single month so it is great to have him on the show we're gonna get a lot of great expertise today there are two ways that you can submit cards to psa for grading the first is that you can go direct to psa you can find out information about that on their website the second is that you can go through a bulk submission service and i'm very pleased to announce that joe and i have partnered together to bring you the sports card investor bulk submission service for psa grading and through our partnership you can often get better pricing better turnaround and a higher level of service than you can get by going through psa direct so if you are considering submitting to psa for grading consider submitting through our bulk submission service to find out all about it and to register your cards all you have to do is go to sportscardinvestor.com and click on grading in the main menu bar but regardless of whether you use our bulk submission service or whether you're going direct to psa this episode is for you because today we're going to tell you the five things you need to know and do to get your cards ready for grading let's go ahead and get started all right joe so the first question everybody has when they're wanting to submit cards to grading is is what cards do you choose to get graded when when are you actually going to get value for getting a card graded so if someone's got a pile of cards and they're trying to figure out what's worth grading what's not worth grading how do they go about making that decision well usually the first thing we recommend is taking their cards going to like ebay completed using market movers you know some frame of reference to look up graded values you know if they've got a griffy donris rookie or they've got a griffy upper deck rookie first of all before we can even engage you know what the condition is is if the card is mint or gem met is it going to be worth putting the investment of the grating into it or not so we always recommend you know what is this card trading at right now in an 8 or a 9 or a 10 and then they can make a determination you know this is worth putting the money in to degrade it now that being said we have some customers who send us their personal collection and sometimes we go you know why are they growing this card but if it's the childhood card or it's their favorite players and they just want to grade every card of you know don sutton or whoever their favorite might have been and so it's not always just about the resale value sometimes it's they just want it evaluated on condition is it worth it you know they want to have all eights or better in their collection regardless of the value but if you're just talking investment resell you know see what the market is on that card in different conditions then make that determination and is there maybe a rule of thumb there i'll tell you personally i'll often look to see if the card in psa 10 is selling for at least 100 or more if it's selling for under 100 in a psa 10 personally i will often choose not to submit it for grading and just to just to sell it raw if i'm going to sell the card but is that a good rule of thumb or what do you advise our rule of thumb is about half that okay but because we my son and i buy a lot of modern rookies prospect on a lot of young guys and we'll say you know if this is a 50 10 and we're buying them for four or five dollars a card you know there's some margin there and so and we think you know this guy could continue to go up over time so that's that's our rule of thumb we're like if you can get 50 bucks out of a 10 and you're buying the card for under 10 then there's you can still make you know you can make a good return on that sure that's a fair point so i guess some of it depends on that spread between the raw price and the graded price because as you said 50 for 10 is a good return if you're buying those cards for four or five bucks whereas if you're if you're if the cards raw are 20 bucks you obviously want to see a little bit more of a multiplier there okay very very good any other factors that people need to look at obviously condition which we're going to talk about in a minute and let people assess condition but other than the the value or whether it's personal collection worthy for themselves anything else a person might want to consider well be careful of what's trending in the moment because you've got to keep in mind that you're going to be waiting if you're paying for you know the modern service or the ultra modern the slower services you're going to be waiting a while to get them back so just because a guy hit a home run in the world series and he you know he got a lot of a lot of status that day doesn't mean six months later he's still going to be hot so you've got to think long term is this going to be worth putting the money to money into six months from now not just in the next month yeah that's a very very good point now conversely i guess the same holds true as well that if a player is maybe not as well known today his cards are not very valued today but you think he has the opportunity a year two years from now to see his cards lift then you would like perhaps to get them graded today so that when he becomes hot you're maybe one of not that many who have graded cards of that player already and are able to put them into the marketplace yeah i mean michael porter jr is a good example from last year we had people grading him not based upon what he was doing at the time but what they expected him to be doing this season as he got more play in time you know so yeah somebody's forecasting what's where's that players going to be in the future absolutely and i want to give everybody a great recommendation to look up those values to determine what the cards are worth there's a great free way to do it and that is to use our sports card investor app in fact it's the easiest way to look up the values of your cards in psa 10 condition psa 9 condition as well as in raw condition so you know what that spread is you can get the sports card investor app by going to the app store on your phone and searching sports card investor it's totally free all right let's move on to talk about assessing the condition of cards because i know that has such a big impact on value so psa is going to look at your cards based on four factors and those four factors are going to determine the grades and of course you want to get as good of a grade as possible because the psa 10 is always going to sell for a big multiplier over what a psa 9 would sell for and that will sell for a multiplier over what a lesser grade will sell for so what are those factors joe that matter when it comes to grading and more importantly how can somebody who's going through their cards tell if their card has all four of those really important factors and has the potential of getting a psa 10 grade well first of all i would start off with centering whenever i'm evaluating cards to purchase or to grade out of my own collection the first thing i look at is centering and that was one of the hardest lessons for me to learn we started submitting to cards psa back in 1998 and i remember my very first batch i bought a large stack of tony win rookies and i was like what is 80c what is that you know i had no clue that you know the centering was so critical but when you start getting a lot of off-center grades back you learn it very quickly because it becomes very painful financially so i brought a couple of examples uh just i'll start with the most extreme which is i've got a 72 top hank aaron in action which is completely oh yeah you can tell i mean there's no doubt the centering on that card is off right yeah and so we often you know this one card is almost miscut it's so far off but it's blatantly off center left to right the centering we measure things in you know numbers and and customers often ask what's the centering on that this is about 99 one right because you've got and and what i say by that is you have about if you if you add it up the left-hand border in the right-hand border and that equals 100 what percent of it is on each side and then you do the same thing with the top border and the bottom border so this one is blatantly off center would not grade well because of that they get more subtle this card's been trending lately the david robinson rookie 89 hoops this one is more like 70 30. you know you've got a little bit of border on the other side but still off-center enough where that has no chance of a psa 10. yeah yeah 75 nolan ryan yeah same thing yeah this one's like 90 10. you know again and then brought an example of a graded card from my collection abraham lincoln 72 tops which is an 80c beautiful corners and edges but too much border on the top and so and that's an interesting point because a lot of people when they're looking at centering they look at the left and they look at the right and that's important but also important is the top and the bottom as well and sometimes you can end up with a card that's actually well centered left and right but not center top and i saw that especially with a lot of the older cards like when you're talking about 80s cards and 70s cards you see that a lot where it shifted up or down on the card yeah so i brought a perfectly centered mickey mouse look at that this is a 57 barrett uh mickey mouse nine yeah with near perfect it's a mini card with near perfect borders all the way around perfect centering yep you can tell the centering on that for sure so that's the very first thing right so and psa allows you a little bit of variance it doesn't have to be dead 50 50 to get a 10. they give you a little bit of leeway on either side but but not a lot right yeah i mean typically if you if you if it's 55 45 you've got a shot i mean i've seen tens that were that i thought were 60 40 but it's it's rare it's rare usually they've got to be to the to the visual eye it needs to feel i mean i say i use the field test like you know this feels pretty much spot on you know to have a shot and so that's that's the first thing i start with when we pre-screen cards for customers and they're saying hey we're really shooting for nines and tens that's the very first thing because uh the prism is a perfect example um prison the last couple years there's been so much off centering and you often right off the bat as we go through a customer's order we're like nope nope nope and we don't have to look at the corners and edges because we know right away the centering is too far off to get a high grade okay but it's not just centering it's also corners i know that's a big deal tell us about that yep brought a couple of examples for you here this is a 74 nolan run classic ryan card uh but what do you see immediately yeah a corner in the upper left there is is definitely kind of chip back yep so these we often now that's a pretty blatant example um we often use we sell these magnifiers and we we recommend it's a 10 power loop other cards you need to blow up more so we'll put the card literally right up against the corner and look at it and like the top right corner looks pretty good to the naked eye you put it under here you can see there's also a lot of fuzz on it so you know their psa is not doing this just naked eye they're using professional equipment to examine the cards and so so you want to check out all four corners especially on vintage like on a white border a white card like that with a white border it helped magnification helps tremendously you know now if you've got a 71 tops card you know with the black borders it pops much more it's much more noticeable to the naked eye here here's an example of a 93 jeter car that's been trending very popular you know and from from me to you it looks pretty good yeah from here looks good and i was actually going to grade this card this week and then i looked at it closer and as you can see top right corner oh yeah it's it's a little yeah it's it's a little pushed back in the top right corner i see what you're saying there yeah for sure and so a card to the naked eye that looks pretty good uh when you look at it closer and certainly under magnification this would probably grade a six wow that that much of a difference just because that one corner is dinged because it's a serious bump on that it's not just a touch it's it's it's almost like a minor fold on that corner so you have to and as i tell people as there is such tiny variants when you get to 7 8 9 10 the smallest of factors can change that grade and so because we get customers all the time calling us like oh all my cards are gem met they're all gem met you know and then we're like you know there's a lot of factors you may not be you're thinking about so uh you know corners are a huge deal huge deal have to pay attention to every one of those and then talk to me about edges and and the you know the edges around the card i know that that plays in as well yes it does so normally that's kind of the order i start with centering then corners that's the next most obvious thing the edges sometimes it takes a little more uh attention and detail to uh i brought here's a 86 very bonds uh another very hot card we just sold one today for nearly eight hundred dollars for a 10. this one looks pretty clean centering's a little bit off but if you check out the top edge oh yeah you can tell there's a little bit of of kind of you know edge wear there it's not it's not a clean edge across the top and you have to be very aware that on black border cards which you know the bottom bottom border of course is white top borders is black so the white i call this chipping you know white chipping on the very top and uh you have to be aware because you basically got a seven or an eight in your hand here even though the rest of the card's pretty clean but the top border is chippy and then also i brought a 92 jeter classic which unfortunately i have a stack of these and they all have the very same issue which you can probably catch pretty quickly there yeah uh not a not a black board yeah but right across the top again once again you see that that's not a clean edge the edge looks a little slightly frayed you see a little bit of white through that edge across the top yep so you know you go you go from corners excuse me centering corners edges every one of them is critically important and then you get down to probably the toughest to catch sometimes which of course is surface and this is the surface issues is what has caught me on grades before where i've submitted cards that i was like oh this card is perfect this card's going to be a 10 and it comes back as an eight and i'm like what the heck happened and i'll look at it you know real closely in the case and and turn it around under light and then all of a sudden i'll see a small defect on the surface a little print line or a little some type of little scratch on the surface particularly with the modern chrome cards your prisms those types of cards it can happen a lot and it's it's often hard to tell unless you're really looking at it closely right yeah i'll start with a vintage example here this is a 62 top strikeout leaders with cofax again naked eye looks pretty good looks good from here oh yeah yeah i can see there's some there's some marking there yeah some kind of residue almost you can actually feel it on the surface it's like oh yeah you sure can yeah there's just a tiny bit of it's almost clear residue but it's there's something there on the card so so you know this with that noticeable you've probably got a five at best wow can knock it down real quickly that's why it's important to look at all of these factors yep also got a i was actually gonna grade this one here in atlanta we love chipper jones got a 91 tops chipper and very bottom you can see just the tiniest little stain in the bottom border there yeah yeah it's got yep a little bit of a little bit of a stain yeah so again you know you've got a probably a seven here just with that little stain so and as you were talking about what we see the most of nowadays with service issues are modern day prism cards prism chrome so for that's one of the things because prism and chrome cards right out of the pack phoenix cards you know optic cards usually your corners are going to be sharp your edges are going to be great your centering can vary certainly but surface is often an issue even right out of the pack this is a 2012 prism shack that i actually was prepared to send today and i looked at it closer and you can see in the top right there there's a little small there's a little small scratch it looks like yeah you only catch it if you look at it in certain light and the bottom line is you can't really expect a mint even a nine mint grate on a card it's not meant there's a surface issue it's minimal you know and i've had customers come in you know and i'll point stuff out they're like seriously they're gonna downgrade for that i'm like seriously they will you know so even the smallest thing like that so that's one thing i always encourage customers before they before they send us their prism and their chromes and their finest any of that stuff you know take a look at the surface really closely because your edges are probably fine your corners are probably fine if your centering is spot on that's the one thing that will get you all right so now you know to look for those all those factors corners edges centering and surface let's say you've done that and you've found some cards that look perfect in all ways let's talk about what's next so if you've identified cards that you think pass all the criteria to get a gem mint grade not so fast because something as small as a fingerprint that you put on that card while getting it ready to send off for grading can cost you a gem mint grade joe talk to me about cleaning cards and what people might want to do before sending their cards in yeah we always recommend that customers we're mainly of course talking about modern day prism chrome finest and so forth so we always recommend customers take a close look at the surface we recommend using like a microfiber cloth and then check the card closely because they can easily this is not altering the card in any way it's simply you know getting a fingerprint off the top so you know they want to rub the card carefully and not add another fingerprint in the process and make sure it's clean hold the edges yeah don't touch the surface of the card again once you've cleaned it kind of defeated the purpose there slide it back in in a soft sleeve and then a semi-rigid and send it in so these are you know cheap highly recommend everyone we we don't clean in any way we don't alter a cart in any way uh we always tell customers you know prepare your car we pre-screen them you know we check the surface we check the corners edges but there's a liability issue there if i tell people oh yeah i'm going to do things to your card you know so we absolutely do not do that we pre-screen it but we do recommend to customers if they've got any chrome stock cards to check them real closely and use a microfiber cloth to clean it because yeah i've had cards come back for customers you know and this is in past time as we learned this process and they'd go oh man my fingerprint's on there i've got i have a derek jeter sp foil rookie card that visible within the psa case is a fingerprint on the card and so what would it might have graded higher it probably would have graded higher it may be a card now that has to be cracked out and wiped and resubmitted because that type of thing can inadvertently cost you a grade what type of cloth joe that's just a it almost looks like the type of cloth you'd use to maybe clean sunglasses is that right yeah it's just just a small microfiber these actually come this particular one i have here comes with our magnifiers okay and because it's used to clean glass surface and so but it also will clean chrome well uh and so you don't have to spend don't have to break the budget on it just uh something small handy you know get a few of them you know and wipe those cards down so so that the surface is nice and clean awesome yeah good stuff good stuff and you sell those magnifiers and i guess those cloths come with it on gotbaseballcards.com right yeah we'll have to put a link to that also on our sports card investors site in fact we'll get that up if you go to sportscardinvestor.com to our grading page we'll make sure to link to the magnifiers from there as well okay so we've got our cards cleaned we're ready to go we think but now let's talk about the next step in the process so whether you're submitting your cards direct to psa or going through a bulk submission service like ours here at sports card investor you've got to create a list of the cards you're going to submit this is a requirement of the process and it has to be a detailed list so joe tell us about this process of creating this list well we've made it really easy for all of your users they can download the form right on sportscardinvestor.com they can download the the simple excel sheet they can fill out the information upload it right there as soon as they upload that we capture all that information so before the cards ever come into us we already know they're on the way we know what to expect we have a online version of the form we can use to check in their order and so we basically ask for you know we have columns for quantity brand year card number player serial number estimated value and then what service level they're choosing because we have some customers that you know they may only be grading a five dollar card but they want it back really fast so we have to know that because you know we don't want to make assumptions as to what level they want joe let's also talk about the value of the cards because you said that's something you have to put on the spreadsheet is the value and that also affects what price you're going to pay for grading um you know i mentioned that the sports card investor app is a great way for people to look up the value of a lot of different types of cards obviously market movers are as well for people who have a larger collection and are doing it more seriously from an investing standpoint are they taking the raw value of the card is that what they're doing when they're putting it on the spreadsheet yeah that's got to be one of the most confusing parts of this process is we submit the cards to psa based upon the raw card value however depending on what the card grades let's say you've got a card and raw card value is 75 so you can send it on the basic service but then it grades a 10 and so now it's worth 300 there's a good chance that psa will up charge us and therefore we have to charge the customer for the next tier sometimes i guess the best example is i had a customer earlier this year last year sent in a jordan rookie first time submitter it was a jordan he'd had forever and i had to call him you know after he got a nine and i was like you owe me 575 dollars great and he was like do what he was like you know no no no it's supposed to be like 250 i'm like no it's a nine it's like and so i and he was like well you know it shouldn't be more and i was like i'm sorry that's the way it works it's basically we call it value-based pricing yeah that you know and that's common in other industries cgc does in the comic industry and so uh submitters need to be aware of that so we we try to save them as much money as possible sitting on the cheapest level that we can however there is a chance for those up charges now psa typically only does that from what i've seen if it's fairly blatant though right they they won't they won't often like kind of micro look at like every single card it's a little bit above the level if it's like in the case of like a jordan rookie where the grade really catapulted the value of the card it's cases that are a little more obvious where that might happen right and there's a there's a lot of invoices we get back where we're like oh you know this they could have up charged here but they didn't uh when it you know it's it's 150 card and it was sent on the under 100 service you know so so they don't need to feel like every single time it's going to be bumped yeah but it does happen and it is at their discretion this is by the way one of my least favorite parts about how psa does their pricing i i don't i don't like this i don't i don't condone this we are of course big fans and supporters of psa in general because we love the grading service and obviously joe's you know huge psa dealer and the bulk submission service is working out great i wish they would change this practice maybe they will with some of the new leadership coming in who knows but as a someone submitting your cards for grading it is something to watch out for the good news is that the only time you would get up charged like that is if you got a really good grade that is causing your card to multiply in value potentially many times over so the pain of you know for example the person having to pay a couple hundred more dollars for their jordan rookie to get graded hey buddy you just got a jordan nine that card is currently worth a hundred thousand dollars probably at the you know around then depending on when you're watching this video right oh yeah so yeah i think he's the only one who's ever complained about being up church because everyone i've actually had customers even say boy i hope i owe you a lot of money that's right because they're they're they're hoping for some up charges that means they got a lot of high grade yep great so you got your spreadsheet filled out you sent it back to joe or you sent it off to psa the final step then i guess is to get your cards in the sleeves and get them packaged up and ready to go so let's talk about that next so it is time to send your cards in to get them graded but first you got to get them sleeved you got to get them packaged joe take us through this process all right yeah here's where we run into issues when we receive them so love to educate viewers on this process we highly recommend first of all using card savers this is what psa asks us to send them in so might as well start with that less handling of the cards and that's not a normal rigid top loader that's a kind of a semi-rigid these are specialty products called card savers you got to buy yourself a pack of those on amazon or ebay or you can you can buy them direct through joe here i got baseball cards yeah the the graders prefer not to receive them in top loads we prefer not to see not to receive them in top loads but when we do we we receive them for customers but we prefer to receive everything in card savers also here's our recommendation if you're sending vintage if you're sending 50 60s you can put the card right in the card saver if you're sending modern day chrome and prism we highly recommend using a soft sleeve first put it in a penny sleeve and we also recommend not just a standard penny sleeve but an oversized penny interesting the thick so the thick sleeve penny sleeves you're in trouble of the new beckett shield brand that we sell there's a 130 point thicker wider penny sleeve it is so much easier to get the card in and out you can literally damage a card while you're sleeving it if you're not careful so these are just a little bit wider we go through thousands of these you drop them in the penny sleeve then put it in your semi-rigid then once you've got them all packed in the order hopefully in the order of what they've been written up in on the submission form then we usually recommend using like a you know small box you want it tight so the cards aren't going to shift in shipping we usually recommend a small box inside a larger box and the post office you get you can get free priority mail boxes from the post office um we you know we sell cardboard boxes and you know something you have around the house will probably work but we pack them tightly so they don't shift put some peanuts or bubble wrap around that inner box and then use like a large priority mailbox we highly recommend shipping depending on the value you're shipping out we recommend adding insurance we certainly recommend adding signature required we receive dozens and dozens of packages a day and we like the customer to have the assurance it's well worth you know five dollars or whatever the cost is right now to have proof of delivery you know so that they have assurance that it got here or if they're shipping directly to psa so they have proof that it's gotten there so we highly recommend adding that one more step because you know we've had customers uh send us up with no signature no insurance and then it floated around the postal system for a few days and then they're in a panic because they had no coverage yeah absolutely absolutely yeah that's that's really good advice and of course when you when you uh submit through our bulk submission service at sports card investor uh you're actually shipping the cards directly to joe's card shop here in atlanta joe's got a large card shop and he's got a team here every single day to receive the cards immediately put them into their evaluation and grading queue and then to send them and then to send them off to psa yeah we've got a very precise system as many as we've been doing we sometimes are processing i think new year's eve we actually said we did 2200 cards that day wrote up 2200 cards in one day but we typically process about a thousand a day for customers and so it's a constant process of shipments coming in getting checked in getting pre-screened getting broken down by category and whether it's you know vintage modern ultra-modern and then expedited ones and so forth and then you know getting them sent out we ship out the psa multiple times per week they don't sit here okay so we are going to do another video in a week where we are going to talk about exactly what happens once your cards are submitted and what that what that process looks like and what you what steps are going through there that you need to know about don't forget to get the free sports card investor app in the app store so you can check out the prices of cards and if you're real serious about submitting a lot of cards and and understanding the value of your collection then you're gonna want market movers and you can find out all about market movers by going to sportscardinvestor.com and clicking on market movers in the main menu bar joe this has been a pleasure thank you so much for this oh thanks for having me absolutely and we will be back in a week with joe again for the next part of our series on psa grading thank you you

Channel: Sports Card Investor

Views: 373,086

Keywords: sports card investor, sports card investing, investing in sports cards, sports cards, sports card, sports card flipping, flipping sports cards, football cards, basketball cards, baseball cards, hockey cards, soccer cards, football card investing, basketball card investing, baseball card investing, football card flipping, basketball card flipping, baseball card flipping

Id: 79i5N_tJ1r8

Length: 30min 29sec (1829 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 21 2021