Released: August 18, 2026 | Duration: 23:06
Prefer audio-only? 
About This Episode
Grading is expensive again. CGC still runs the only bulk tiers ($17 to $55 a card), PSA and Beckett start at $80, and TAG has paused everything below its top tiers. In that climate, which grader you send to matters more than it did five years ago when Beckett's 9.5 was the standard. This episode audits actual grading rigor on five of the most-graded cards in the hobby: the Van Gogh Pikachu, the 1999 Unlimited Charizard Holo, the Upper Deck Griffey rookie, the 1986 Topps Jerry Rice rookie, and the 1990 Fleer Michael Jordan. Each has a population well above 50,000, well past the sample-size threshold where Cochran's formula puts the margin of error at 3% or better.
The percentile math on those five cards tells an uncomfortable story. A PSA 10 lands in the 57th percentile on the Van Gogh Pikachu (42% gem rate), the 88th on the Jordan (12.27%), the 97th on the Griffey (3.13%), and the 99th on the Jerry Rice (0.14%). A BGS 10 Pristine on Pikachu commands almost 3x the PSA 10 ($7,200 versus $2,650) because only 95 of 5,121 submissions cleared that bar, and the market has correctly priced that scarcity. Meanwhile a CGC 10 Pristine (90th percentile on Pikachu) sells for less than a PSA 10 that only cleared the 57th, a BGS 9.5 on the Jordan hits at 15% versus the PSA 10 at 12% yet trades for a third of the price, and Tag 10s and SGC 10s consistently rank harder than PSA 10s while pricing below them. Beckett and SGC show up as the stricter graders across all five cards.
The devil's advocate cases get their airtime: yes, people submit their best cards to PSA, and yes, PSA 10s hold the top prices on most of these. But CGC 10 Pristines were higher on two of the five, every card had BGS 10 Pristine above the PSA 10, and the PSA 9 on the Jerry Rice ($5,484 versus $85,000 for the PSA 10, only two percentile points of difficulty separating them) looks like the buy-and-hold hiding in plain sight. Brand recognition is doing the work grading rigor used to do, and that gap is where the future upside sits. Frameworks at slabnomics.com.
Topics Covered
- Why bulk-tier shutdowns (CGC $17 to $55, PSA and Beckett $80 minimum, TAG paused low tiers) make grader choice matter now
- Cochran-style sample size math and the five iconic cards drawn from Gemrate’s top 100
- Van Gogh Pikachu: BGS 10 Pristine’s 3x premium correctly priced, CGC 10 Pristine (90th percentile) undervalued vs PSA 10 (57th)
- Upper Deck Griffey rookie: BGS 10 Pristine at 0.26% gem rate versus PSA 10 at 3.13%, and why double the price makes sense
- 1990 Fleer Jordan: every grader stricter than PSA, BGS 9.5 beats PSA 10 in probability yet sells for a third
- 1986 Topps Jerry Rice: PSA 9 as a buy-and-hold at $5,484 versus the $85,000 PSA 10
- 1999 Unlimited Charizard Holo: CGC 10 Pristine at 0.08% gem rate ($41,000) finally earning its premium
- Devil’s advocate: best cards flow to PSA, and PSA still holds top prices on most of these
- Where brand recognition and actual grading rigor have decoupled, and how to position for the shift
Full Transcript
Setting the Stage
Welcome to Slabnomics. This podcast is meant to help you become a better sports card and TCG investor. In this day and age where the grading climate is becoming more and more difficult, it's high time we look at what the graders actually do, how hard it is to get gems per each grader, and take a look at what the values are for each grade among the different graders. If you've fretted over which grader to send to, whether PSA, BGS, CGC, tag, or SGC even, this is going to be the podcast for you.
After setting the stage, I'm going to dive into the data where I took five different cards and I looked at all the different grades from tens all the way down to nine, how hard it was to get those grades, and where I see opportunities for the future. Then to wrap things up, I'm going to give you guys a little bit of a devil's advocate because I want to make sure that I'm covering all my bases. You see, I don't have any special allegiance to any of the graders, I'm not paid by any of them, and I've used all of them to grade cards in the past. Well, with the exception of tag. In my first year of grading sports cards, I spent $21,000 grading cards. And I even made a video about that, which I'll link at the end of this video for you.
Before we dive into it, please take one second and go hit that like button on this video. That means a lot for the channel. Thank you so much.
The Grading Climate Right Now
Now to preface this, I've talked about this in podcasts recently, but many of the graders have shut down their bulk and value tiers, making grading expensive. CGC remains the only bulk submitter, and the only one with options ranging from $17 to $20 to $55 a card. If you're looking to go the PSA or Beckett route, you are going to be paying $80 minimum a card. And tag has paused all but the highest tiers right now.
Some comments on my last video talked about how CGC 10s should be considered PSA 10s. So for this follow-up video, I want to actually look into the data. I wanted to look at the math for you guys. Diving into that data, you guys are going to be as surprised as I was, I think. Finding that getting a PSA 10 is not near as hard as you would think, and most other graders are actually above a PSA 10 in terms of difficulty to get.
Now you might be thinking to yourself, what does it matter if PSA 10s are the most valuable? This is common knowledge, right? PSA has the highest values in terms of sold cards. But what you're going to find out through this data is that that's not actually the case. And even if it were, things are changing in the grading space. And just like five or six years ago, when Beckett was actually the standard with their 9-5, the premium for these graded cards is not set in stone by any means. Collectibles and cards, chief among those, like any asset, exist on an ever-moving playing field. And being future-proofed is how you get ahead when things start changing.
So rather than looking at personal preference when it comes to slabs or graders or turnaround times, let's take a look at the actual math for these. Looking at five of the most graded cards in history, two Pokemon cards, one baseball, one football, and one basketball card. Let's go to the data.
Sample Size and the Five Cards
So the first thing to understand about the data is that we don't want to be using too small of a sample size. It's well known when trying to gather surveys that you need as big of a sample size as possible so that you eliminate any errors. There's no magic number, but Cochrane's formula says that the margin for error is 5% at 385 sample size, 3% for over 1,000, and plus or minus 1% over 9,000. So we're going to be looking at the top graded cards for these categories so that we can eliminate any of those statistical anomalies.
Using the top 100 cards of all time from our friends at Gemrate, I chose examples spanning TCG, baseball, and football. For our baseball example, we used this upper deck star rookie for Ken Griffey Jr. One of our TCGs was the good old Pikachu with gray hat, Van Gogh. The other was the Charizard Hollow Unlimited. And then we went and grabbed a football one down here, with the most graded football card being the Jerry Rice Topps 1986 rookie. And I forgot, we also threw in a Michael Jordan card for basketball, right here, the 1990 Fleer. All of these have populations that span the 50,000 plus mark. So let's see what the data tells us.
In order to work this data, I plugged in three things. The condition rarity of the population, meaning how many reached that grade out of how many total were graded for that grader, then the percentile, meaning how many other cards for that grader were under that grade, and finally the value if there was one. This percentile field is what we're going to use most because when we're looking at things like the condition rarity of the population and just taking the number divided by the full amount, things can start getting confusing when we move down the grades.
The Van Gogh Pikachu
So for the Van Gogh Pikachu, one of the most graded cards in the entire population for sports and TCG, unsurprisingly, the rarest grade to get is the BGS 10 black label. But one thing you're gonna see here, and you're going to see in much more places, is that the BGS 10 pristine is fundamentally so rare, and people just don't get that. The black label has only six copies of 5121 graded, but the BGS 10 pristine is no slouch with only 95 copies achieving this grade. It still lands in the 98th percentile of all BGS grades.
And for the Pikachu, the value actually reflects this. This value is coming in at almost 3x the PSA 10 value down here of 2650. That BGS 10 pristine is $7,200. So the first question is does it make sense that the BGS 10 pristine has such a premium? Well, if we look at the PSA 10 numbers, there's 49,717 PSA 10s. Remember, BGS 10 pristine had only 95 copies achieved that grade. That 10 pristine lands in the 98th percentile, meaning 98% of the cards submitted to Beckett were unable to achieve at least that level. Going down to the PSA 10 here, you'll see that the gem rate was over 42%. And this means that the percentile for PSA 10 is in the 57th percentile among all of the PSA submissions.
This is one case where the market's figured out just how rare and how difficult it is to get the BGS 10 pristine, and the value has boosted because of that. One thing that I've found is that the more iconic a card is, the more in demand it is, the quicker the market catches up to these kinds of things.
For all y'all watching along home at YouTube, you're going to see that the PSA 10 is actually the seventh ranked in terms of percentile. Meaning it was the seventh most difficult grade to get out of all submissions for all graders. Cards ranked above that in order are BGS 10 Black Label, BGS 10 Pristine, CGC 10 Pristine, Tag 10, BGS95, and SGC 10. Only CGC 10 in terms of gems for all the graders trailed PSA as far as difficulty in achieving that grade.
Where Beckett and Tag Beat PSA on Pikachu
And if you're following along on the spreadsheet, you'll even see that getting a BGS95, which was in the 65th percentile, was more difficult than getting a PSA 10. This doesn't make any sense. And further, why is a PSA 10 $2,650 on market, whereas a BGS95 is significantly lower at $1,525.
For you tag enthusiasts, it's much harder to get a Tag 10 than it is to get a PSA 10. You'll see in the 82nd percentile is your Tag 10 versus that 57th that we quoted for PSA. Now, not every card is going to be like this, but you are going to see that CGC 10 here is easier to get than a PSA 10, and you'll see the values properly respect that. In terms of simple condition rarity, a PSA 10 is more rare than a CGC 10, but significantly less rare than a CGC 10 pristine, which is in the 90th percentile to get. Yet a CGC 10 pristine is worth less than a PSA 10. So if only 10% of cards are able to achieve that CGC 10 pristine, yet 42% of them submitted to PSA are able to get that 10, then in what world does it make sense that a CGC 10 pristine is worth less than a PSA 10?
This whole spreadsheet is truly topsy turvy because if you see here, BGS 9 is actually much more difficult to get than a PSA 9, mostly because PSA has so many 10s, but in terms of rarity to actually achieve a grade, it's much harder to get a BGS 9 than it is to get a PSA 9. One more thing to point out here, a BGS9. I think a CGC 10 pristine is fundamentally undervalued for this card. And the population submitted to CGC at 7,097 is enough that we have statistical relevance.
Of course, PSA is always going to dominate all the numbers that we're going to see, especially because PSA became so prevalent after COVID. You'll see here that has 116,000 in terms of its total pop, but these other graders have had enough submissions to make this statistically important. Beckett is over 5100, and as I said, CGC over 7,000. Tag only has 155 submissions, and SGC is trailing at 311.
The Griffey Rookie
Now maybe you're saying to yourself, Matt, this is a Pokemon card. Of course, CGC is gonna have a lot of numbers. So let's go ahead and check out a baseball card, one of the most iconic baseball cards from the 80s, the Upper Deck Griffey rookie card. If you expected the PSA 10 percentile to be the highest on this one, you're sadly mistaken, but it's actually closer than the other four. Achieving a PSA 10 puts you into the 97th percentile of those submitted.
But just like with the Van Gogh Pikachu, the PSA 10 is far and away not the hardest grade to get. And yet its value does not make sense in terms of that difficulty percentile. A BGS 10 black label has never really sold on open market, nor has the SGC 10 P, meaning the SGC 10 pristine. But you will see here if you're looking at the spreadsheet on YouTube that a CGC 10 and SGC 10 are both more difficult to achieve than a PSA 10. These are both in the 99th percentile of difficulty versus that PSA 10 in the 97th.
The gem rate for PSA 10 is about 3%, a little bit over that, whereas CGC 10 is 0.58%. Not CGC 10 pristine, which there are none, but just a CGC 10. Even SGC for this card that's been submitted quite a bit, 18,615 times over at SGC, has only achieved an SGC 10 1.28% of the time, less than half of the time that PSA has gotten in in terms of percentage.
You'll again notice that a BGS 10 black label is far and away the highest in terms of difficulty, followed by the SGC 10 pristine, and then rounding out the top three is our Beckett 10 pristine. This is another card where the Beckett 10 pristine clearly shows a premium over the PSA 10, and rightly so. With only 0.26% of submissions achieving a Beckett 10 pristine versus the 3.13% of PSA 10s, having a Beckett 10 pristine be about double the value of a PSA 10 makes perfect sense.
If you had any doubts as to Beckett 10 pristine being a higher grade than a PSA 10, the tab before and the subsequent three tabs are going to dispel that rumor for you. But the wildest thing about this sheet is that both an SGC 9.5 and a CGC 9.5 are actually much more difficult to achieve versus the PSA 10. These clock in at 0.28% and 1.2% respectively versus that just over 3% for PSA 10.
Tag is actually going to trail PSA in terms of the percentile difficulty, clocking at 3.87%, the 96th percentile. As opposed to the Van Gogh Pikachu, you're also going to see the BGS 9.5 be only in the 93rd percentile versus that PSA 10's 97th percentile of difficulty to achieve. That makes a lot more sense. So PSA in terms of difficulty to achieve, in terms of its 10, comes in at eighth rank for the upper deck Griffey rookie card.
The totals of submissions are pretty vast on these. We have over 116,000 for PSA, Beckett has over 46,000, CGC is no slouch with over 7,000, tag has over 1,000, and SGC has over 18,000. If I had to sum up the highlights from this spreadsheet right here, I would say that both Beckett and SGC are showing themselves to be stricter graders in terms of overall condition. But yet, as before, your PSA 10 is 5.5K, whereas your SGC 10 is just 4.3k. And your CGC 10, which is much more difficult to get, is clocking in at 3.6K. So again, we see that the brand recognition of PSA is what drives these values, not the actual grading standards.
The 1990 Fleer Jordan
So that's Pokemon and that's baseball. Let's check out the GOAT Michael Jordan. In this card, not a single grader is as easy as PSA when it comes to getting a 10. PSA 10 gem rate is 12.27%. That's in the 88th percentile of the submissions. Tag comes in at 90th percentile, SGC at 91st, CGC comes in at 94th, and of course all the pristines and black labels come in much more difficult than that, all falling within the 99th percentile.
CGC95 is more difficult to get than a PSA 10, and yet it is worth about one eighth of the value. Similarly, a tag 10 is more difficult than a PSA 10, but it sells for 20% less. And a CGC 10 sells for almost a third of what a PSA 10 goes for.
While you have a 12.27% chance to get a PSA 10, you have less than 1% chance to get a BGS 10 pristine. Yet for your trouble, you would only get 3x the value. And an SGC 10, which is not even 1% probability, gets you less than 2x that PSA 10 value with your 12% shot. And a CGC 10 pristine is almost on par with a BGS 10 black label in terms of difficulty to achieve.
Probably the most telling thing that I see from this sheet is the comparison between the BGS9. BGS95 has a 15% probability to grab versus that PSA 10 12%, and yet it sells for almost a third of the price. This sheet clearly shows that the PSA 10 premium is out of control. And if you look at the total subs for all of the graders for this 1990 Fleer Michael Jordan, you'll see about 71,000 to PSA, less than 7,000 to Beckett, less than 3,000 to CGC, only 125 to TAG, and less than 10,000 to SGC. PSA is really just gobbling up pop reports at this point.
The Jerry Rice Rookie
Let's move a few years back and check out football with the 1986 Jerry Rice rookie card. Now this is one where PSA actually makes a pretty good showing. Their gem rate is only 0.14%, but the premium attached to it is so incredibly crazy compared to the difficulty to get all the other grades. If you're looking at the sheet here, you'll see that PSA 10 is in the sixth row, and above it is a CGC95, an SGC95, and of course your BGS 10P and your SGC 10. Funny how I find myself saying SGC 10, of course, is above PSA 10. In terms of difficulty, it's just shown itself to be much harder for any of these other graders to give 10s.
And BGS95, which used to be the gold standard of gems, is just below the PSA 10 at 0.48%. Of course, this is significantly more than the PSA 10's 0.14% gem rate, but does it warrant selling at only 20% of the price of that PSA 10? I certainly don't think so.
Now one thing I will say because I'm not gonna rag on PSA this entire video, but looking at the PSA 9 at being only 2.42% of the population, it being in the 97th percentile to achieve shows me that the PSA 9 is significantly undervalued. It costs you $5,484 to get a PSA 9 versus the $85,000 it costs to get the PSA 10. Yet the percentile of difficulty is just 97th to 99th. It's really tough to get a PSA 9. For the long term, I see PSA 9s in the Jerry Rice rookie to be very nice buy and holds. No tag data on this one, sorry guys.
The Charizard Holo Unlimited
Now maybe you're saying to yourself, well, of course a PSA 10 is going to be easier to get than all of these. People are sending all their best cards over to PSA. This is something I'm gonna talk about when I finish up with all of this data, so hold on for a second there.
But moving to our last card in the 1999 unlimited Charizard Hollow, you can see that plenty have been submitted through other graders here. On this one, CGC has 14,000 submissions, and we finally get CGC 10 pristine really strutting its stuff here. A CGC 10 pristine for this card is only 0.08% probability, it's in the 99th percentile of difficulty to get, and the value reflects it this time. It's 41,000 for that card versus PSA 10 being at 22,500.
Now it might almost be double, but PSA's probability to get this card in a PSA 10 is 0.47%. And remember that CGC 10 pristine was only 0.08%. They're both in the 99th percentile, but the rarity of the CGC 10 pristine is truly in another realm. And stop me if you've heard this one, but an SGC 10 or a tag 10 is still much harder to get than the PSA 10 counterpart. Yet allegedly you can pick up an SGC 10 for 5,752 versus that 22.5k sticker for PSA 10.
In this card though, the CGC 10, not the pristine version, is much easier to get in terms of all of these because we're looking at 99th percentiles for all the top guys. So having a CGC 10 at just over 6k makes some sense to me, but it still looks pretty cheap when you're looking at this sheet. It's a little bit more difficult to get than a BGS95, but a BGS95 is about 50% higher in terms of the price. So again, we see CGC not really holding its value in terms of how rare it is to achieve these high grades.
Population totals for the 1999 unlimited Charizard Hollow are over 104,000 for PSA, 9700 for BGS, 14,000 for CGC, about 1300 for tag, and almost 2,000 for SGC. This is enough data to get us plus or minus 3% in terms of error. Last things here, looks like tag 10 is much harder to get on this card, and the price actually reflects it a little bit, putting the value above the PSA value. Unfortunately, we don't have any BGS 10 black labels or SGC 10 pristines for this. There is one CGC 10 perfect out there somewhere floating around, and there is BGS 10 pristines. Unfortunately, we don't have the values for it.
Making Sense of the Data
So that's the data. Let's go back and wrap it up. So now that we've looked at the data, let's make sense of it all. The findings on these iconic cards are that a lot of times CGC 10 pristine is much harder to get than PSA 10, whereas the value of CGC 10 pristine is much lower than a PSA 10. Furthermore, I see a lot of opportunity in SGC 10s, which seem to have had a higher standard of grading than we've seen in these PSA 10s, at least for these cards. A lot of times those BGS95s are actually equivalent to PSA 10s in difficulty to obtain.
Devil's Advocate: Do People Send Their Best to PSA?
Now I told you I was gonna play some devil's advocate here, and I'm gonna do that now. The first argument that people might make is that people submit the best cards to PSA, and that's why they have such high gem rates. Now, this might be true in recent days, but remember that BGS was king only six years ago. Furthermore, there's actually a lot of reasons to submit to other graders over PSA. A lot of things that PSA has done has rubbed people the wrong way, and even more to the point, it's much more cost effective a lot of times to send to Beckett or send to CGC. In some of the cards that we looked at, specifically the Jerry Rice with $85,000 as the price tag for a PSA 10, you're looking at a pretty hefty upcharge to send that to PSA. Some people might not want to spend $3,000 in the case that they get a 10.
And price isn't the only object. There's been a lot of controversy about PSA's partner program, where people have found some of the grades change after they've sold to a partner. This isn't my place to comment on things I don't know about, but it's certainly something that's going around the zeitgeist.
Devil's Advocate: Are PSA Values the Biggest?
The second thing that I want to bring up is that people will say that PSA 10s are the biggest value. But I showed you two cards where a CGC 10 pristine is actually a higher value. And every single one of those cards had BGS 10 pristine as higher, not to mention what a black label will get you. Price is not the only object. There's speed to get your cards back, there's the amount of capital that you have to put up up front, and there's personal preference when it comes to the labels.
But what we found today, putting values aside, is that all the other graders besides PSA have seemingly more strict grading standards than PSA. The upside at Beckett is real, not to say that Beckett doesn't have their own problems, but I believe that we're seeing Pokemon lead the way for showing us how Beckett 10 pristines and black labels can command a massive premium on the market, and there's a lot of future value tied in there.
Closing
As the grading landscape continues to shift, future considerations about where you're going to send your cards to grade become more and more relevant to you. If PSA's only real value is saying that they have the highest card values to sell at, that seems like a very precarious value proposition to me. As in all things, do your due diligence here, but start looking for more opportunities outside the pale.
Thank you to all of you who have gone to my DMs and let me know that you've shared these videos with your friends. If these are conversations that you're having with them, make sure to shoot this video off to someone that will benefit. If you're interested in more information about grading, I'm going to put my one year findings about grading at the end of this video. Feel welcome to check that out. And as always, thanks so much for being here. Keep building, and I will talk to you later.