Ryan Barone (@ballcardgenius, Card Expert) is a lifelong member of the hobby. He has been quoted in PSA Magazine, and his content has regularly been mentioned in “Quick Rips” (the Topps RIPPED Newsletter) and across other hobby publications. hello@ballcardgenius.com; Last Time Ago LLC dba Ballcard Genius.
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Nothing can be more intimidating than grading a card thanks to “detailed” processes and instructions, establishing your card’s declared value, and the dreaded pop report.
The good news is, only two of the three things mentioned above are actually needed to grade a card, while the third – the pop report – is more of a tool for collectors and card flippers to use to figure out things like how rare a card is, how difficult it is to find a card in a particular grade, and thus, its potential value.
But as a massive chart with a lot of trading card abbreviations and numbers, it’s not the easiest thing to read!
That ends now.
What is the PSA Pop Report?
The PSA Pop Report is a data table that tells you how many (the population) of a certain card exists in a particular grade. Said differently, the Pop Report tells you how many of a particular card has been given a certain grade. So, when someone says “this PSA 10 is a pop 1” that means the card in PSA 10 condition has a population of 1, and thus of all the times someone submitted that particular card for grading, it received a PSA 10 grade only once.
Reading the PSA Pop Report
On to the fun stuff, and yes, once you get a handle on this you’ll start having a lot more fun with graded cards. Here is the chart I pasted above:
The first two columns are pretty self-explanatory and not unique to the pop report by any means—”CARD NO.” is the card’s number on the back and “NAME” is of course the player’s name for the card in question.
The next column’s three rows need to be used in conjunction with the columns spanning from “AUTH” to “TOTAL.” “AUTH” stands for “authentic” and represents those cards that were only authenticated and not graded. The numbers to the right of “AUTH” represent the different grades PSA awards to cards that are submitted for grading (as in PSA 1, PSA 10, etc.).
“GRADE” in this table represents the number of cards that received the grade from “AUTH” to “10.” For example, if we look at Josh Allen DT1, there have been:
- 6 cards graded as a PSA 6
- 9 cards graded as a PSA 7
- 34 cards graded as a PSA 8
- 106 cards graded as a PSA 9
- 218 card graded as a PSA 10
Thus, at the very end of the Josh Allen DT1 entry, we see a “TOTAL” of 373, which is the total number of cards that have been awarded a whole number grade (6+9+34+106+218). Now, I say “whole number” grade because underneath “GRADE” you’ll see “+.” Because PSA awards half-grades from 1 to 8.5, the “+” represents the cards that received such a half-grade.
So, while 373 cards had been graded as a PSA 6, PSA 7, PSA 8, PSA 9, or PSA 10, there was one that was awarded a half-grade – PSA 8.5 – as you can pick up on from the “1” in the “+” row and within the “8” column.
In all honesty, this is the primary use case for the pop report. Find the card in question, find the grade (1-10) you’re curious about, and look at the number under each grade.
With that said, there are a couple of other basics to know, so let’s take a look.
Going back to “AUTH” you can see that out of the entire 2021 Optic Downtown checklist that has been submitted with PSA, only one card – the Josh Allen Gold Vinyl 1/1 – was submitted to be authenticated only. It’s for this reason you see “1” under “AUTH” and no other grades for that particular card (which makes sense given it is a 1/1).
Qualifiers
Underneath the “+” sign we see the letter “Q” which stands for “qualifier.” Have you ever seen a card that was in a PSA slab as a PSA 9, but also had initials like OC, MC, or something else? These are what are known as qualifiers, and mean that a card meets the criteria for a particular grade, but has significant issues in one particular area. And, instead of dropping the card’s grade to a far less number, the qualifier is added.
This bit from PSA helps explain:
“Moving forward, the mint card with mild centering issues would grade a PSA 7 or PSA 8 as opposed to being a 9(OC). In other words, the centering would be reflected in the numerical grade. However, in the case of the mint card with significant centering issues, the grading staff may decide to apply a qualifier, assigning the card a 9(OC) rather than dropping the grade all the way to a PSA 4 or PSA 5.”
Putting it all Together
All in all, not so bad, right? As a buyer, if you’re scouting a card and the listing says something like “Ken Griffey Jr. PSA 10 POP 3” you know that this card has received a grade of 10 only 3 times.
As a seller, you might wish to take advantage of that same saying, or perhaps even add “none higher” as in Barry Sanders PSA 9 POP 10 none higher.” This means that, while the card is a PSA 9, a PSA 10 doesn’t exist, and thus, there are “none (graded) higher” than a PSA 9.
