Introduction

It is hard to learn how to grade.  A major reason that it is hard to learn how to grade is that there is no global standard.  There are very vague and incomplete standards in various magazines, but mostly it seems that card grading is based upon a series of local standards.

You can learn to grade by looking at professionally graded cards or by finding a local dealer who can grade.  It will be especially difficult to find a local dealer who can grade, because if they've got their grade on something they sell, there is an incentive for them to over-grade, either consciously or unconsciously.  This is one reason why professional grading exists.

I will try to attempt to write a grading standard, not because I think I am competent to do so, but because I can't find one that is acceptably good and acceptably complete.  I'm going to talk about grading vintage cards, and most of my examples will be from 1950 Bowman, because I have a lot of those, and I have scans of a whole bunch that I have had but have sold.  What I'm saying should apply to a lot of old issues, but there will be some stuff that doesn't apply at all to modern cards.

I doubt that this page will turn you into a good grader, but I hope that it will give you some ideas about what a good grader does, and about what the various grades should represent.

This page is a work in progress, and I expect that some people will take issue with what I've said here.  That's fine!  But please email me with your suggestions rather than dismissing me as a stupid guy who can't grade.  I would like to make this page better, and if I don't know what I'm talking about, please tell me so I can fix it.

Attempts to define a grading scale

Before I explain how to grade, I should discuss what the various grades are called.  Even this is a point of some confusion.  The first Beckett (November 1984 "Beckett Monthly"), has five grades listed:  Mint, Excellent, Very Good, Good, and Fair.

A more recent Beckett (Winter 2001 "Baseball Card Plus") lists Pristine, Gem Mint, Mint, Near Mint-Mint, Near Mint, Excellent-Mint, Excellent, Very Good, Good, Fair, and Poor.

Other scales include "Very Good-Excellent", which is, sensibly, between Excellent and Very Good, and some scales define something called "Fine", which seems to be a rarely used synonym for some other grade.

Many graders give in-between grades as well, like "Excellent+" or "Near Mint-".

When I grade, I use the 10-point scale (which actually includes 11 grades), and I give half-grades in some cases.  The 10-point scale includes Gem Mint (10), Mint (9), Near Mint-Mint (8), Near Mint (7), Excellent-Mint (6), Excellent (5), Very Good-Excellent (4), Very Good (3), Good (2), and Fair/Poor (1).

I'm going to discuss each of these grades in turn.  I'll explain what I think each grade means in terms of basic wear first, then I'll include another section that describes in more detail some common problems and how these affect the grade.

Sometimes I'll refer to how I think that PSA would grade cards, which I think is fine because PSA, while they don't publish a standard, sets the standard, since they grade a lot of expensive cards and these cards are in high demand.

I'll show some scans of cards that I think are illustrative.  f you see a ruler in the picture, the graduations are 1/32" (0.8 mm for you metric people).  The full-card scans are typically made at approximately 100 dpi (dots per inch).  The corner scans were done at 1200 dpi and they are all the same size.  The area covered by these scans is 0.26" (6.6 mm) wide x 0.23" (5.8 mm) high.  I chose this size arbitrarily.  This is a very small size, but I don't think that anything else is going to work at all.

Grading a card

The grade of a card is determined by weighing the condition or quality of four basic aspects of the card.  Sometimes, it's easy to grade a card because one aspect is defective, and it's generally recognized that if that particular aspect is defective in a certain way, the card should get a certain grade.

Other times it is much harder to grade a card, since the relative condition of several aspects of the card must be taken into account.  I think that in most cases, a card is graded based upon its worst feature.  If other features of the card are particularly good, the grade of the card might lift slightly, and if several of the card's features are equally bad, it might sink a bit.

Subjectivity in grading comes when people don't agree upon how bad the features are, and/or when they don't agree about how the conditions should interact.

Corners and edges

Corner wear is the most important aspect of card grading and the hardest to get right.  It is pretty easy to figure out the effects of other features, but it is very difficult to effectively evaluate corners.  Subtle variations in corner wear, which is subjectively evaluated, will determine in many cases the highest grade that a card can attain.  If the card does not have mint corners, it cannot be mint.  If it doesn't have EX corners, it is very hard to make a case that it is an EX card.  I will discuss corner wear in much more detail in the sections on individual grades.

Edge wear is usually less of an issue, but sometimes there are specific problems that need to be accounted for in the grade.

Sometimes a card is "born" with edge problems, such as rough cuts, but most corner and edge problems occur outside the factory.

Surface

Assessment of surface mainly has to do with creases and wrinkles and scratches.  Some "printed on" aspects of centering are covered here as well.  A lot of times, if a card has a specific surface problem such as a wrinkle, the grade of the card is pretty obvious.  Other times, it's harder to know what to do, like if the card is a little out of register, or has a chip.

It is sometimes difficult to decide if a problem is a corner problem or a surface problem.  A bend across a corner is usually a corner problem, not a surface problem.  This is an important distinction because if it's a surface problem, it's a crease, and this would drop the card to VG.  But as the "crease" gets closer and closer to the corner, it becomes less of an issue, since it becomes a corner problem.  Eventually the problem gets so close to the corner that it may only drop the grade from Mint to NM/MT.

Centering

The higher the grade, the less tolerance there is for poor centering, and in many cases, centering is crucially important.  If you have a stack of sharp-cornered cards, often a huge percentage of them will be duds because of centering.  This means that you'll have a card that is Mint, but you can't call it Mint because it's badly centered.

Centering is a particularly nasty feature to try to grade, because it's something that the card is "born" with -- a card doesn't get bad centering once it leaves the factory.

In order to assess centering, you have to know how to compute it.  To compute centering, you measure the width of a border, then you measure the width of the opposite border.  Divide one of these values by the sum of both values, and express the result as a percentage.

For example, if you have 2 mm of border to the left, and 3 mm of border to the right, you  have 5 mm of total border. 2/(2+3) is 0.40, which is 40%.  3/(2+3) is 0.60, which is 60%.  So this card is considered to be 40/60.

When you are measuring borders, you measure at the worst point.  Some cards are cut at a tilt, so depending upon how you measure, the centering is either 50/50 or 75/25.  The value you'd use is 75/25.  This is how PSA appears to operate.  It is possible that SGC operates a little differently, but I am not certain.  Some sellers will use the larger value, or an average value, but I think this is incorrect.

If a card is centered badly one way, and well the other way, you don't average the two measurements.  The centering is always a worst case thing, although when I am grading cards, I will be more likely to downgrade more severely if a card is badly centered both ways.  If a card is centered 50/50 one way, and 80/20 the other way, you can't really hype the 50/50.  The 80/20 is what matters.  If it is centered 80/20 both ways, this is worse, but not a lot worse.

The effects of centering

Centering is such an important grading aspect -- it affects every grade -- that I feel that I should discuss it before I talk about the individual grades.

If you are trying to buy cards from someone, you cannot allow them to grade cards (and charge you based upon the grade), without taking centering into account.  A card graded 90/10 is not mint, it is not NM/MT, it is not NM, no matter how good the corners are, and no matter how much you might wish that it is.  Poor centering is a heart-breaking problem, and many dealers refuse to assume the pain of having to downgrade cards for it.  I have bought many lots of cards, advertised as NM or better, that have beautiful corners but are all off-center.  If you get a lot like this, you are getting a bad lot, and your dealer is either refusing to grade properly or is intentionally over-grading.

I'm not a centering fanatic, but beyond a certain point, poor centering becomes a major issue and completely destroys eye appeal.  I think this should be strongly reflected in the grade.  Some will argue that "that's how the card was made," but people who do this are kidding themselves.  Some of the cards do have nice centering, these cards are stunning, and these cards deserve the high premiums due cards in high grade.  That many old cards have poor centering is the reason that the book values are so high for those that don't have poor centering.  Don't let someone talk you into paying MT price for a card that's EX.

In the sections on individual grades, I sometimes quote from the PSA and Beckett standards on centering.  When sending cards to PSA, try to avoid sending cards at the lower end of the centering range.  These are often discounted a grade.  So don't think that you can send in a NM card with 75/25 centering and get a 7.  In many cases, you will get a 6.

The numbers from Beckett's guide may not have anything to do with graded cards.  They are taken from the Winter 2001 edition of "Baseball Card Plus", in the prelude to the regular price guide, which does not cover graded cards.

I didn't quote from SGC's standard, but they are considered to be slightly easier on centering than PSA is, even though their standard seems to use the higher of the two PSA centering values (meaning that they require 70/30 for NM, whereas PSA requires "75/25 to 70/30", whatever that means in truth).  I'm not certain they've even had any quantitative standard for long.  I've called them and spoken with them in the past, and they seemed to be more willing to grade each card on its own merits.  As of this writing (December, 2001), they do have a quantitative standard.

Those of us who are not our own grading services have to make sense out of the various standards that do exist when trying to figure out how to grade cards.  I've had to make my own rules in order to handle strange stuff that isn't covered explicitly by other published standards, and there is a good chance that my rules don't correspond to those of the major grading services, or to rules used by major dealers, but here goes anyway.  Here are a few of my rules:

1. If a card is centered 100/0, I downgrade it to VG/EX at best.  it's always an interesting issue when a card is great except for one really bad problem, like centering.
2. A card centered 95/5 is VG/EX+ or EX at best.
3. If a card is 90/10, I would top it out at EX.
4. A card centered 80/20 tops out at EX/MT+.
5. Centered better than that, I try to predict the PSA grade.

Centering is less important on backs.  If a card is centered 90/10 on the back, this might not be a huge deal.  If the back is 100/0 or worse, I would tend to downgrade the card and note the problem.

The 10-point grading scale

Poor (P), or 1

A Poor card has lost its dignity, due to serious abuse.  It's been creased and wrinkled about as much as possible, may have been left on the garage floor somewhere in close proximity with the oil spot, it may be written on very rudely, or it could have a piece missing.  It is the lowest grade, so if a card is complete and looks terrible, this is where it goes.

A card with a hole in it, no matter how small, is Poor.

I don't get a lot of Poor cards, so I don't have a picture for this grade.  Just picture anything else you see here with the corner ripped off, or a moustache drawn on the player's face, and you have it.

Fair (F), or 1

A Fair card has some dignity remaining, but it's been through the mill.  It has been wrinkled and/or creased, but you can still make out the picture.  It may have some surface damage, but it hasn't been completely trashed.

I downgraded this card, a 1950 Bowman #1 Parnell, to F, because of the multiple creasing through the face and the somewhat ugly looking layering on the top left.  As fair cards go, I think this is a pretty good one.  The creasing could be heavier, and there could be some surface wear, and the corners could be more rounded.

A card with tape on the front is at most Fair.

On the 1-10 numeric scale, P and F share a number.  Some grading companies call P 0.5 or 0.0, but PSA doesn't.  They don't distinguish between poor and fair.

Good (G), or 2

A Good card has some eye-appeal but it has obvious flaws which are evident and unpleasant.  A Good card might have a heavy crease that doesn't make the card completely disgusting.  A typical "crease across the middle" might cause a card to be downgraded to Good condition.  A Good card is not a dog.  It doesn't have a crease so bad that you're worried that a piece of the card is going to fall off.

As you can see from the scan, a good card can have very significant corner rounding, but the corners are not disgusting looking.

I'd allow a mark, but I would note it.  If someone drew horns on the player, that would downgrade the card further.  If a card has writing on the front, it can be at most Good.

This 1950 Bowman #18 Eddie Robinson has heavy corner rounding, and some surface wear, but if there are any creases or wrinkles they are not seriously impacting the important parts of the picture.  The card is missing a little paper near the right edge, but I don't think it hurts its appeal that much, so I didn't downgrade this to F.

Very Good (VG), or 3

VG was defined to me as, "looking mint at arm's length".  This is not completely accurate, because you can see that rounded corners aren't sharp at arms length, but the basic idea is sound, I think:

The card should look very nice upon casual inspection, and problems should show up after inspection that's a bit closer.  What this implies to me is that there can be something wrong on the back.  If a card is otherwise very nice looking, but it has some paper loss on the back, but not the whole back scraped off, I would call it VG.

VG is the highest grade that can have a true crease.

I downgraded this card, a 1950 Bowman #231 Preston Ward, due to poor centering, surface wear, wrinkles, and rounded corners.  If the centering was dead on I would have called it VG/EX, so this is a pretty strong VG.

Very Good/Excellent (VG/EX or VGEX), or 4

VG/EX is a very interesting and important grade, because it is the highest grade that a card can get if it has a wrinkle on the front.  Wrinkles are incredibly common on vintage cards, and even cards that appear to be in very high grade can have them.

Some people believe that VG/EX is the highest grade that can have a wrinkle on the back, as well.

So often you will see VG/EX graded cards that look extremely nice.  If you get one of these, look for a wrinkle.

If a card has a whole bunch of wrinkles, it should be VG.

A VG/EX card without a wrinkle can exhibit a little bit of corner rounding, but it's not apt to have really ugly corner rounding.  The edges might be worn, but not extremely seriously.  There could be some surface wear, including perhaps a little paper loss.

I think that a VG/EX card can have writing on the back, but I may be in the minority on this.  I'm talking about initials, and the card should be very nice otherwise.  If the card was generally beat, and had writing, it should go lower.

This card, which is 1950 Bowman #245 Papai, was given a grade of VG/EX by me, perhaps a bit optimistically, due to grime or toning (I can't remember what I decided that was) and wear on the corners.

Excellent (EX), or 5

Excellent is a catch-all middle grade between cards that look pretty nice and cards that are distinctly worn.

The card in this example is a1950 Bowman #74 Johnny Antonelli that I grade as EX.  As you can see in the corner scan, the card has significant wear on the corners, but the corners are not what you'd call rounded.

If you look at the full-card scan, the card still looks basically square, and in this case is well-centered with a nice image.  I would still grade this as EX if it had a bit more wear and a picture that wasn't quite as pretty.

Sometimes you'll see very nice looking EX cards (PSA-5's, for instance), and you'll wonder why they were graded EX.  These cards often have a wrinkle on the back.

You should never see a crease on an EX card, and you should never see a serious wrinkle on the front.  I would downgrade any wrinkled card to VG/EX, but not all graders do.  I think that if someone grades an otherwise mint card as EX, due to a very small wrinkle on the front, they should explain why.
Grading a card EX if it has a wrinkle on the back is a little risky in my opinion.  I would be careful not to give such a card this grade without some other explanation of what is going on, because it's a little more conventional to call a wrinkled card VG/EX, I think.

Excellent/Mint (EX/MT or EXMT), or 6

An extreme novice or someone who is delusional might call an EX/MT card mint, but it's pretty hard to do this if you are paying attention, you aren't being really lenient due to card's age, and are not blinded by dollar signs.

People who come into card shops with cards they think are in super shape seem to have a lot of EX/MT cards.

The card to the left  has a corner that could appear on an NM card if it was the only corner like this, but the card had four corners like this, or similar to this but with dings, too.

The corners on the card could be a bit worse and still be EX/MT, in my opinion, but if they were much better, the card would be NM.

Sometimes a corner will be square, without a lot of wear on the tips, but mangled up with a couple of dings.

The card is a 1950 Bowman #21 Reese PSA-6, that was probably sent in in the optimistic hope of getting a PSA-7.  It's not a bad card -- it's just a little dark around the corners.

Sometimes a card with better corners will be graded EX/MT because it doesn't have good enough centering, but this one has perfectly fine centering, so it's apparently a pretty nice 6.

PSA claims that a card should be 80/20 or better to receive a 6.  Beckett's guide requires 70/30, which seems quite strict.

EX/MT cards may not have any wrinkles.
 

Near Mint (NM), or 7

A NM card will never have a wrinkle, although I have seen some PSA-7's with cutting defects along a back edge, which look like wrinkles.

A 7 can have a light scratch, or occasionally a very light stain, and sometimes some bad looking print.

In PSA's standard they claim that a 7 must be centered "approximately 70/30 to 75/25 or better on the front," but you will often see cards at that end of the range graded 6.  Beckett's guide requires 65/35.

Near Mint/Mint (NM/MT or NMMT), or 8

A NM/MT card looks perfect upon initial inspection, but a close inspection shows very light corner wear or an edge ding or something.  Sometimes all of the corners are worn, but rarely very seriously.

I've seen a few PSA-8's with dings, sometimes pretty serious dings that are more serious when viewed from the back.

The scan, which is a scan of a 1950 Bowman #38 Bill Wight in NM/MT, doesn't seem that much different from the NM scan above, but to the eye the card is slightly sharper.

NM/MT cards may have some wax on the back, but the card is usually free from any significant defects.

This card is nice and I expect that many dealers would have called it mint before the advent of professional grading.

Compare the full-card scan of this card with that of the PSA-7 in the previous section.  It isn't easy to tell the corners apart via a scan, which is another reason why it is hard to evaluate high-grade stuff online.

In PSA's standard they claim that an 8 must be centered "approximately 65/35 to 70/30 or better on the front," but a lot of cards at that end of the range end up as 7's.  Beckett's guide requires 60/40 or better.

Mint (MT), or 9

A mint card is a card with essentially no wear.  A card can have some defects and still be a mint card, and there are a great many cards that are not mint even though they've come straight from a pack, because many cards have dings, centering issues, bad picture, etc.

A mint card won't have anything remotely serious wrong with it.  No heavy print, no bad registration, etc.

The card in the scan is a PSA-9 1950 Bowman Football #105 Price.  The corner in the corner scan is razor, and even at 1200 dpi, which on my screen is about ten power, it has no wear.

You can see a little wear along the edge, but that spot of wear is the only wear on the corners or edges, so perhaps this was good enough for PSA.  In the full-card scan, it is obvious that the card is high-grade, but it's hard to distinguish it with any certainty from the PSA-8 and the PSA-7 seen previously.

In PSA's standard they claim that a 9 must be centered "approximately 60/40 to 65/35 or better on the front."  In Beckett's guide, they claim that a card must be 55/45 or better.

Gem Mint (GEM), or 10

This is a grade that is almost meaningless outside of professional grading, and perhaps in some cases it's meaningless there, too.  A gem mint card is supposed to be mint with extra appeal.

The difference between mint and gem mint is slight enough that you can ignore it when buying raw cards.  If someone says that a card is mint, they are probably wrong, so if they say it's gem mint they are probably as wrong.

In PSA's standard they claim that a 10 must be centered "approximately 55/45 to 60/40 or better on the front."  Beckett's guide allows 55/45 one way and insists upon 50/50 the other.

Fractional grades

A lot of graders give "in between" grades such as EX+ or NM+.  These are just cards at the high end of the grade.  Some graders give grades such as NM-, to indicate that a card is NM but a little too off center, or EX-, to indicate that a card is wonderful but has a light wrinkle on the front.  I give fractional grades, because I think that the extra differentiation is good for my buyers.  The risk is that the extra differentiation leads to more subjectivity.

Common defects

Creases (surface)

Do not confuse creases with dings.

Wrinkles (surface)

Print marks (surface)

I walked into my local card shop (Pete's) with a vintage PSA-8 because it was beautiful and I wanted to show the card to Pete and whoever else.  One of the customers looked at it and remarked, "Gee, they sure go easy on the old stuff, don't they."  I was stupefied, because the card was a high-end PSA-8 (which I had crossed over from an SGC-92 NM/MT+).  Then she told me what she meant -- the card had a rough cut along one edge.

I'm not sure why rough cuts happen, but the explanation everyone always gives is dull cutting blades.  I've seen some so rough that I doubt any blade was used at all, it's more like the cards were ripped apart along a fold.

I wouldn't downgrade for a rough cut, because they don't bother me.  Obviously, they bother some people a lot.

1950 Bowmans rarely have rough cuts.  The 1952 Bowman #153 Hatfield in the picture has a rough cut left edge, which should be more or less visible in the scan.

I called PSA and asked if they downgraded for rough cuts and the person I spoke with said "no".  This seems at odds with the opinions of much of the collecting population.

Dings (corners)

Layering (corners, sometimes edges)

Corner bends (corners)

Stains, grime, and water damage (surface)

Stains show up really obviously on scans for some unknown reason.  On more than one occasion I've emailed sellers that they missed a stain, and they'll look at their scan and wonder how they missed it.  The answer is probably poor lighting.  I used to use a halogen light when grading.  I'd get a bunch of nice cards and take them to show Pete, and they'd look bad in his shop, because he had overhead lighting that showed colors more realistically.

Water damage will sometimes change the color of a card, and sometimes it won't.  It will make the surface of the card rough, and may disturb the gloss.  This is of course extremely serious.

Trimming (alteration)

Chips (edges and surface)

Register (surface)

Toning (surface, more rarely corners and edges)

Sometimes you'll find cards with indents that I call "particle indents".  Put a few grains of sand on a table, put the card on the table, face down, and set a phone book down on the card.  If there are lots of them on a card, that's pretty bad and should be downgraded and described.  One or two aren't as big a deal and could perhaps be lumped in with surface wear.

Scratches (surface)

Scratches aren't as bad as wrinkles as long as they are minor.  I have a PSA-7 with a pretty evident scratch, but without the scratch I think it may have come back as an 8, like several of its lot-mates did.

Glue (surface)

This is distinct from wax.  Sometimes a card will be glued into a scrapbook and pulled up later.  You might see some glue on the back.  I think that glue is pretty serious but I don't know how others handle it.  I might top a card out at VG/EX if the glue isn't serious and the card has a perfect front, but otherwise I think it's VG at best.

Marks and erasures (surface)

Marks should be noted, because people hate them.  In my opinion, initials on the back tops a card out at VG/EX, and anything written on the front typically limits a card to G.

Erasures are worse than marks, because there can be an element of deception.  Sometimes people will try to erase a stain on the front of the card, which removes all of the gloss.  This is another reason to take cards out of sleeves when examining them.

I bought a card as NM once where someone had erased inked initials off the back.  The erasure had rubbed all the way through the card stock, until you could see the layer of thin white stock that coats the front of the card.  That card went back immediately, but I assume that the seller, a major national online auction house, is still out there making the same careless grading decisions, since they did not respond to my accompanying letter.

A card that has been marked and erased is downgraded significantly no matter how well the erasure was made.  Often the gloss will be gone, if the mark was on the front.  If you have cards with marks, don't erase them and attempt to sell the cards as unmarked.  This is deceptive.

Surface wear (surface)

Wax (surface)