Sports Card Investor: A Day in the Life Working as a Card Grader! (CGC Behind the Scenes)

Okay, it's my first day at work grading cards. CGC hired me for the day as a grader. Let's see if I can get the job done. All right, I'm feeling like today is going to be a great day. Well, you're late. So which one of these is my office? Keep walking. All right, so I've got 10 cards for you. Okay. I'll have you grade these and I'm going to review it and we'll see if you get Okay, no pressure at all. All right, let's get going. I'm nervous. My first day as a grader. Am I going to make the cuts? We're about to find out. Let's see what cards they've given me here. Oh, wow. A nice selection of different cards from different eras. I got my work cut out for me. This is the first one and I like this being the first card because I know this card. This card is from my childhood. This is the 1989 Fleer Michael Jordan All-Star sticker card and I've got one of these from when I was a kid. Now, what's interesting right off the bat as I look at this, this sticker is notoriously off-center and the one that I have at home, the image is shifted like way far. I think it's to the left. This one looks really well-centered. I'm going to measure. To me, the left-right on this looks like 50-50 centering, but let me measure this centering. So, I'm putting this right where the blue line meets the white line and measuring here. I actually think this is just about perfect 50-50 centering left to right, but definitely doesn't appear to be well-centered top-bottom. Much less border at the top than the bottom. So, I'm going to assume that's a top-bottom centering issue even though the left-right is good. Let me look for surface. Let me get it here in the light. This is how the real graders do it. They got this nice overhead light here. They're catching the card in the light to see if any surface issues show up and I'm not seeing any. That looks like a really nice surface of that card on the front and I think a really nice surface of that card on the back. This looks like a good copy of this card. Now, let me look at the corners because that's where you can run into issues, corners, and edges. The front actually looks really good to me. Oh, I feel like a pro now using my loop and everything. Let me look at the back. Okay, I can tell right off the bat here. This upper right corner on the back, I definitely see some white. Little bit in the lower right. A little bit in the lower left. So, the corners are not perfect. The upper right is the worst issue and then there's a little bit of an issue in the lower right of the back. Centering, as I said, I think the top-bottom centering is an issue even though I think left-right is good. Overall, I think this is really nicely conditioned for a sticker. Somewhere between an 8 and a 9. Because it presents really well, I'm gonna go 8.5. 8.5 is my official grade for this. Alright, hopefully Andy agrees. We're gonna find out in a minute if Andy agrees with me or not. Now, let's move on to the next. Okay, now we got another very classic card. It's the 1988 Fleer Michael Jordan card. Very, very classic card. Ah, something catches my eye right off the bat on this one. I wonder if they were trying to sneak this by me as a test, but I caught it. I caught it. Look at a little stain right there. A little bit of an issue right there. If you catch it in the right light, there's a little bit of staining here in the lower part of the front of the card. So, I'm gonna circle that and write stain. That's definitely an issue. That's gotta knock that thing down a couple of grade points. Centering looks pretty good to me, but let's see if the ruler agrees. Basically, basically perfect left-right centering. I think top-bottom might be not quite as good. Top-bottom is slightly off, but it's not bad. Let me look at the surface. Surface seems good. Corners and edges. Oh, I found a corner issue. That corner down there. Lower left in the back. Really not great. Okay, with this stain and a corner issue and a little bit of top-bottom centering issue, I'm gonna assume that stain hurts the grade quite a bit. It's definitely noticeable, especially with it being on the front of the card. Even though the card is otherwise nice, I think I'm gonna take it down to a six because of the stain. All right, feeling the pressure now. Now, we're going modern. Victor Webinyama. It's gonna be a little tougher to see the surface issues on a card like this. Now, we're getting into some ultra-modern, right? That purple ice pattern, man, that can really hide surface issues, but I'm not seeing any. Looking at the back surface. Okay, I do see a bit of an issue on the back surface. Right there on the back surface, there's a couple of like dimples. Dimples. I think that's the official term. Dimples. There we go. We got some dimples. All right, let's see. Left-right centering slightly to the right and top-bottom. How do you measure the top-bottom on that? Oh, you know what I think you probably do? You probably measure it from that point to that point. So, if I were to do that, let me use my ruler there to get a little more scientific. It's not. It's slightly shifted down as well. Did not see any surface issues on the front. I don't see any edge or corner issues on the front. And I think the edges and corners on the back look good as well. So, it's really just a matter of those back issues and a little bit of a centering issue. This card is pretty good. I'm going to go 9. I think that's the best card so far that we've seen. That's my professional grading opinion. All right, let's see what we got next. Oh, this is a beautiful card. Look at that. Freddie Freeman. Love that. Los Angeles Dodgers World Series card. Now, here's the problem with this card. How do you measure centering? And that's the thing. You know, the graders, they have to know all these different types of cards. It's not easy with sports cards. Honestly, I don't know what people in this room are going to say if I say this out loud, but I think it's probably a lot easier to grade Pokemon and TCG than it is to grade sports cards. The guy over there is giving me a new skit right now. I think he liked me saying that. But it's true. Pokemon, it makes it easy to grade. Sports, my God, you got to know every type of card. You got to know what the centering is on cards that don't have borders. You got to understand like so many more aspects and you got to like be able to see through all the, you know, parallel variations and everything of that nature. It's not easy. But you know what? I'm up for the challenge. Let's grade this one. Here we go. So I think I'm going to measure centering by going from the top of that Topps Chrome logo to probably the bottom of the name. Maybe there's might be slightly shifted up. Assuming I'm measuring centering the way that it was meant to be measured. That might be slightly shifted to the left as well. So I think we got a couple of slight centering shifts. Looking for any type of surface issue. Front looks really clean. Going to the back. I mean, there's the tiniest of imperfections there. Tiny, tiny little print dimple. Man, how picky do I want to be? Because this card's actually in really good shape, but it's got a couple of a couple of slight issues along the way. I'm going to go nine. I was debating if I went a little higher on that one, but I've seen it. They're all minor issues, but there's a few of them. So I'm going nine on this card. All right, we got some soccer. Soccer's obviously been hot this year with the World Cup having happens. And this is a Ronaldo card. Nice Ronaldo card there. Nice looking card. Okay, let me look at the centering right off the bat. Looks slightly shifted to the right. I can just kind of tell that with the naked eye. Definitely shifted to the right a little bit on that card. Top bottom maybe slightly shifted too. Yeah, slight shifting on the centering. So slight shifting to the right and slight shifting down. Surface clean. Edges and corners. Edges and corners look pretty good. Other than some pretty minor centering issue, this card's solid. I'm going nine five baby. I'm going nine five. Here's why. This card to me looks perfect other than centering slightly off. Centering slightly off, slightly down, slightly to the right, but it's kind of slight. And everything else about the card looks really good to me. So I think the centering would prevent it from getting a 10, but I feel like going all the way down a nine on that card feels a little harsh because I think the other elements of the card are really strong. So I'm going nine five. All right, I feel like I'm getting the hang of this now. I feel like this isn't so bad. I wonder how many cards a day though as a grader I would have to look at because this is taking me a little while per card as well. I'm having to spend some time. I suspect this is one of those things that you get better at as you go. But since I'm a rookie, I'm taking my time. I'm taking my time on this Cam Ward card. I gotta tell you this Cam Ward card looks nice. This one looks nice. I want to give some 10s here. Maybe this is my first 10 because the surface on the front of this card looks solid to me. I think that's pretty good. Centering? I think centering is pretty good too. Let me just verify that with the old ruler. Now I assume, you see, this is one of those tricky designs. I assume centering on this, you're going to the top of the letters on the left of the card. So if I'm going to the letters, well, I'm going to the top of the letters. You see, am I going to the top of the letters or am I going to the bar? Oh gosh, I don't know. You see if I'm, that's a different story, right? If I'm going to the bar, I'm exactly one-tenth of an inch there and I'm exactly one-tenth of an inch there. So I'm going to assume I'm going to the bar because if I'm going to the top of the letters, it's actually not centered well. So I'm assuming I'm going to the bar. Now what do you do over here though? Look, it dips down here. It dips down there. See, this is that thing about you got to really know your cards. I think this card is really well centered. I don't think it has any surface issues. The corners and edges on the front look great. The corners and edges on the back, they look great too. Okay. I'm going to get my first 10. I think this card is worthy of a 10, not a pristine 10 because I saw a little bit of imperfection. I'm going to go gem mint 10, but I am going to go 10. I think we got a 10 on the cam ward. Boom. Cam ward, it's a 10 baby. Gem mint. Let's go. All right. Six cards down, four more to go. Man, the life of a professional grader who's got to do hundreds of these cards a day. That's tough. This is grueling and I'm only six cards in. You really got to depend on your eyesight and your sense of things here. I can see why this is a tough job. You're looking at cards all day. I got to imagine by the time you get to four or five in the afternoon, your eyes, they got to be a little tired of staring at these cards under this light. You got to have a lot of focus and precision to keep upgrading at a high level all day long. I can only imagine. I'm what, 30 minutes into the job here and I'm already feeling a little bit tired. All right, but we got a little Shohei Otani. Nothing like Shohei Otani to pick you up and give you a little bit of energy. Surface of this one looks nice to me. Let's flip it back over. Back of this looks really nice to me. I don't see any surface issues at all. Now let me look at centering. This one's one of the easier cards to assess centering on because the border is pretty well defined. I'm being really picky. Centering is just the slightest hair off, I think, on the top bottom. Just slightly, slightly a little more border on the top and the bottom, but that's being picky. Edges and corners look pretty sharp on the front. See, is there a little bit of white there? A little bit of fray just along the top. This card looks really sharp. Let me measure that centering again. I'm starting to get a little nervous now about the centering. Actually, it looks like this card might be a little bit cut in such a way so that there's more border here than here. Huh? Slightly so, slightly so. Okay. I was going to give this card a 10. Now I'm questioning my assessment of a 10 on this card because of the fact that I do think the border gets slightly wider up there than there. Everything else about the card looks perfect. Because I've got some centering concerns, I'm going to go 9.5 on this card. 9.5 on the Shouhei. We've got another Shouhei up next. Tops Now Shouhei. These Tops Now cards historically grade very well. The surface of this card looks really sharp. Looks like a perfect Tops Now. And gosh, this light's really helping me. This desk lamp right here, being able to assess the surface, that's really, really helpful. And the surface on the back of the card looks really solid as well. However, two things jumped out to me that you can really see under the light. I see a little bit of an edge issue there, and I see a little bit of an edge issue there. So I'm marking that on my assessment sheet. That's absolutely going to hurt the grade. So this is another tricky one to measure centering on, but I'm going to go to the left to right of those two words. Top bottom, I'm not so sure about on this, honestly. The centering might be a smidge off left to right. I think it's pretty good, but maybe it's a just a, you know, like a couple of hundreds of an inch off left to right. So it may not be a hundred percent perfect. It's really, all I'm really seeing are those two edge issues. Oh, I maybe a little dimple on the back of the card right there. Slightest dimple on the back of the card right there as well. Okay. So this card does have a few issues. I think I'm going to go nine on this card. I think I'm going to go nine. I was like debating between like nine and nine five, but Andy taught me graders are picky. And so if I'm between two grades, I'm going to go a little bit lower. And so I think this shohei tops now is probably a nine. That's my guess. Feeling pretty good here. Feeling like, uh, you know, feeling like I'm kind of in the groove now. I kind of got it going on and, uh, kind of nice place to work. Wonder, uh, wonder what it would take to get a promotion around here. Feel like I'm ready. Maybe I'm ready to become a head grader. Maybe I can move up to the next level. I feel like I'm there. Let's finish these last two cards up. We've got a Brock Bowers uptown. These, these uptowns and the downtowns are notorious for surface issues. And I can see right off the bat, a very slight, it's very slight, but there's a very slight dimple right there on the front of the card that you can see under the light. You get that a lot with these types of uptowns and downtowns. I also see a centering issue. You can see right here, the left to right centering. If you look at the left of the uptown box versus the right of the uptown box, definitely seems to be shifted more to the left side. We got a little bit of a white in the corner on the front of the card too. So a couple of strikes for this one. It's like a little bit of a print line across the card on the back. Very, very slight, but it is an issue. Okay. Overall, the card presents nicely. Now I'm my fingerprints all over it. But since I did see a handful of issues with this card, granted all minor issues, but I know those add up. I know every time you find a minor issue, Andy taught me when I did the video where he was training me, he taught me that you start by assuming a card is a pristine 10. And then every time you find an issue, you start to bring it down. And I found a few different issues on this one. So I think I'm going to bring this card down maybe an eight, five or an eight, a little bit of edge wear across the top as well. I'm going to go with an eight on this card. I think it's an eight one last card to go. Then we're going to see how I did. And if I get a stay on this job for more than one day or not, we're going to see if they hire me. We're going to see if they promote me or they kick my booty out the door. But let me, let me grade this last card, Jackson darts, emergent rookie card from prism looking for surface issues. It's interesting watching the light dance across the card. There's maybe a tiny little issue on the back little surface issue. It's real minor. Okay. So I think surface for the most part is pretty good. Maybe a minor issue. Let me look at left, right centering. So this card, once again, a very kind of unique, unusual pattern, but I think you can probably look at like the corner of the pattern and see if it lines up well with the card. This does line up well, left, right. The little corner of this pattern is exactly at the left and right border of the card. So I feel like that is perfectly centered, left, right top bottom. Let me look my ruler for top bottom. I think it's about perfect centering. Okay. So I think centering is good. I think front surface is very, very clean on this card. I think the back is very, very clean on this card. Centering maybe a slight, slight tiniest, tiniest of little scratches or indents in the back. Let me look at the corners. Are the corners going to make the cut edges look sharp? This is a good looking card. I think we're going to end with a 10. I'm not going to give it a pristine 10. I'm nervous to give anything a pristine 10 because pristine 10 means the card is just about flawless. And I think if you look at any card hard enough, you can probably find a flaw or two. And I found a flaw or two in this card, even though I think they were very minor, minor flaws. But for the most part, I thought this was a really nice card. So I think, I think we can go 10 on this card. I think we can go 10. Okay, there we go. I got my last grade in. I've graded 10 cards. I feel pretty confident about my grades. I feel like I did a good job, but we're about to find out if I actually did or not. So I'm going to turn these back over to the team here at CGC. Now Andy and his team are going to actually have the pros grade them. They're going to slab them with the actual grades. And in just a second, we're going to compare how I graded these cards to how they actually graded by true pros. And then we're going to find out if I've got a job or if I get fired. All right, Andy, this is the big moment. This is where we get to find out if I keep my job or not as a grader. This is it. Let's find out. Let's get started with this 1989 FLIR All-Star Sticker Michael Jordan card. I did see that the front of this card had some top-down centering issue. There was a little bit of corner issue in the back, but overall, I thought it was a pretty nice copy of the card. I gave it an 8.5. Okay. You gave it, oh, a 6. Wow. Okay. That's a big difference. Oh my goodness. Let's take a look here. This is not a good start for me. This does not bode well for my career. What did I miss? How did this get a 6? It's the centering is your main flaw. It is way off. It's off, yeah, but it's actually further off than really it looks because of this design. And it's off a little bit this way, but mainly this way. That's why it's a 6. That's like a 5.5 centering. So, I knew that the centering was off. I wrote down here the centering is quite a bit up, but I guess I wasn't as harsh on it than you were here. Yeah. And this is one of those things where we would actually stop down and measure that just to be sure of the measurement. So, yeah, that's understandable. You didn't measure on it. You just kind of eyeballed it, I would assume. Or did you measure? Apparently, I didn't measure critically enough. Okay. All right. I did bad on that one. I did bad on that one. I thought that was an 8.5. It only got a 6. Okay. The next card is the 1988 Fleer Michael Jordan card. This one, I noticed a stain on the front. Also, a little bit of top down centering issue. A little bit of a soft corner on the back. I took the grade way down on this one because of the stain. I said this would be a 6. You said it would be a 5.5. So, that one we're pretty close on. Yep. And you're right. This stain, it's got an indentation where it's been hit. So, it's almost a double whammy. But yeah, you're right there. Okay. All right. Well, I'll redeem myself a little bit. Okay. We've got a select Victor Webinyama card. This one, I thought that the centering was a little bit off, both up, down, and left, right. And I noticed a small dimple on the back of the card. Otherwise, I thought the card looked really good. But because there were a few different issues there, I gave it a 9. Okay. You gave it a 9. Got it. Look at that. Boom, I'm back, baby. Let's go. Very nice. Let's go. Yeah. I definitely see that dimple there. You see the dimple. So, we're aligned on that one. Okay. All right. Somebody listened in the lesson here. Feeling a little bit better. I was a little shaky after that first one. Okay. We've got a Topps Chrome Freddie Freeman. This is a really cool card design. It was hard to assess the centering on this because that's one of the tricky things with sports cards that we talked about that are borderless. Borderless card design. That said, I was trying to measure from the text and the logo. I thought the centering was a little bit off. And I also did notice a small dimple on the back. So, for those reasons, I gave this a 9. Okay. You gave it, oh, a 10. Okay. So, maybe the centering is quite a bit better than I thought it was. Yeah. So, this is a good example of, you know, we're not just measuring from here and here. Right. We're actually, this is where we're going to look at the logo if it's equidistance on each side. Okay. And same for this one. Okay. That's not how I did it. Okay. Yeah. And then that's the challenge, right? It's a challenge for graders that are in training as well is knowing where to measure exactly. And for graders who are veterans, you know, this is something that in our continual education and our weekly meetings, we actually discuss, you know, brand new set come out. This is what we're looking for. This is what the designers intended. You have to really dive into the weeds on some of these to really know where to measure from. Okay. It did not get a pristine 10. Did not get pristine. You got a gem mint 10. So, your graders saw there was slight imperfections in the card, you know, and you saw a little, you saw what I saw, which is a little dimple on the back. Tiny dimple. So, that dimple might've kept it from getting a pristine 10. It did. We both saw the dimple. I was more critical on the centering because I didn't quite know how to measure the centering. And that's where I think the difference in the grades Yeah, I think so as well. Okay. All right. Next, we had a Rinaldo card here. This card, I thought this card looked really good overall. I did think this centering was a little bit off left, right and top downs. For that reason, I gave this a 9.5. 9.5. Okay. You gave it a 9.5. Wow. How about that? Okay. Very good. All right. So far, we're going to keep your badge active. I'll let you come back tomorrow. I'm still active. Cam Ward, this was the first card that I thought was worthy of a 10. I did not give it a pristine because I was being picky, but I thought it was just a true gem, meant 10. And you thought it was a 9. A 9. All right. Well, let's take a quick look here. So, this is another little deceptive one because even though there is somewhat of a border, this one is off center a little bit. Is it really? Yeah, it is. And so, it's going to be the centering, the measurement on that's going to keep it from going gem. Gotcha. Yep. The border pattern on this, I wasn't 100% sure even how to measure the centering because of the way the border kind of swoops in and moves in a couple different places on that card. Right. And sometimes that's a great point because sometimes on a card, it's not all four edges or borders. Sometimes it's only three. So, we have to take the distance or the three equidistant. And so, yeah, those are the little tricks that just come with time, right? We come with grading every day and our continual education. Oh, man. I thought I had a 10 there. So far, not so bad. I only got a 9. Okay. A Shohei Otani, Bowman Chrome. I thought we had a little, maybe a hair off on centering, but other than that, I thought the card was pretty ideal. So, I gave this one a 9.5. Okay. You gave it a 9.9. Okay. Right there. And that's one of the things, especially for people that are new in training, their initial training on grading, if I can get someone within a half grade, consistently half grade, meaning they're either tough or loose, but they're consistent in that half grade by the time they finish the first round of training, that's a win. That's 100% win. And so, yeah, I mean, so far we're right there. Okay. Yeah. It was only that first card that I was terribly off on. The rest of them, I've at least been within striking distance. So, hopefully that trend continues. Here was another Shohei Otani card. This was a Tops Now card. The main issue I saw on this one was there was a little bit of edge issue in a couple of places on the front of the card. I thought maybe the centering was a smidge off, but it was really the edge issue that caught my attention. That's why I gave this card a 9. Okay. And you gave it a 9.9. Okay. So, we were perfect alignment on that one. I feel like my grading eye maybe got a little bit better as I went. We got two cards left. This next one was a Brock Bowers Uptown card. I saw a handful of different issues on this. Okay. I took your advice from the earlier video where you said you kind of start with a pristine 10 and then you start kind of knocking down with all those different issues. With all the issues combined, I went all the way down to an 8. Okay. I don't know if that was too harsh maybe, but I was like, well, we got some centering, we got a dimple, we got a little line. I went all the way down to an 8 and you went down to... Oh, you gave it a 10. Wow. Well, let's take a look. You did much better on that card than I did. Well, one thing you mentioned, and it's very common, and this is a great example, is that line. So, the lines are super common on these. And this line is actually so light that this would still fall into a gem mint range. And some examples of what would make that worse, on the front, 100% is going to be worse because it's visual. And like I mentioned before, eye appeal is a large part of the grade. That's why the centering and surface weigh so much heavier than corners and edges. This is an example of that. But where this line is and the degree of it, and there's a few little spots, but these all still fall in the realm of 10. Okay. Well, I was a little bit too harsh on that one. I thought I was a little bit worried about, as I said, everything that I saw was minor, but I added them all together and I'm like, minus half point, minus half point, minus half point. And that's why I got down to an 8. But I was dealing with a lot of very, very minor things. I guess I was a little bit overly critical on that one. And that's not uncommon. When you see multiple flaws on one card, especially when you're starting out on grading, you're going to have a difficulty calculating those out. Because there's going to be some of those flaws fall together on a grade where you'd have three flaws, but it's not really three half grades you're dropping. They may all still fall into a nine range or a 10 range. So it's really just learning about what all flaws, where they all weigh, how many can you have to get that grade. And so that makes complete sense to me. You know, with a number of small flaws on there, it is kind of hard to calculate that unless you really have spent time doing it. Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, back to the training lab for me. The final card, this Jackson Dark card, I kind of felt was the best of all the cards I had seen across all the grading. The only thing, if I was being the pickiest of picky, when the light hit the back, there was maybe one tiny, tiny spot where the light didn't quite perfectly reflect. That's why I chose to give it a Gem Mint 10 instead of a Pristine 10. The front looked absolutely flawless to me. So I was kind of debating Pristine 10 or Gem Mint 10. I went Gem Mint 10. Okay. Let's see what you guys did here. Oh, Pristine 10. All right. Okay. We got our first, we got a Pristine 10. We end on a Pristine 10. That's great. Well, I'll tell you this, Jeff, looking at your grades and comparing to ours, you're definitely trainable. So I would definitely hire you and put you in greater training. Okay. So I'm not in the corner office yet. No, we're going to take a few years to get there. Okay. I got some more time before I get to the corner office, but it sounds like I'm allowed to keep my place on the grading floor, maybe with a little bit of supervision here at CGC. Awesome. Well, Andy, this has been a pleasure. It has. Thank you very much. And we've got a special offer out there for you guys. CGC has sponsored our videos and they wanted us to give all of our listeners a special offer. If you want to grade your cards with CGC, they'll give you a free year membership in their grading program, which gets you 10% off all of your grading orders for the next year. All you have to do, this is for new members. You go to CGC's website, you register as a new member, and you use promo code SCI2026. That's SCI2026. Enter that in when you register for a new member and you get a free year of their grading membership, 10% off all orders. Thank you guys for watching. Thank you, CGC. We'll see you soon with our next video. Take care.