Not One of the 25,619 Tens in These Three Sets Carries a Letter

Most PSA labels carry a number. Some carry a number and then two letters, and the two letters change what the number means.

PSA's own definition is the clearest one available. A qualified card is "a card that meets all the criteria for a particular grade, but fails the standard in one area." Their worked example is a card with the qualities of an NM-MT 8 everywhere except centring, where it sits at roughly 90/10. It does not become a 5. It becomes an 8 with OC after it.

So a qualifier is not a penalty bolted onto a grade. It is a statement that the card earned the higher grade in every respect but one, and a flag telling you which one.

That single sentence explains almost everything about where qualified cards turn up.

The five codes

PSA's glossary lists five:

OC - off-centre. ST - stain. PD - print defect. OF - out of focus. MK - marks, meaning something written or stamped on the card.

Hobby write-ups routinely add a sixth, MC for miscut. PSA's own grade page does not file miscut as a qualifier. It files it as N8, one of the nine codes for a card that comes back without a grade at all - alongside N1 trimming, N2 restoration, N3 recoloration, N4 questionable authenticity, N5 altered stock, N6 minimum size requirement, N7 cleaning and N9 don't grade.

That is a real distinction and it is worth getting right. An off-centre card can be an 8 with a letter. A card cut through the border by the factory is not graded.

They pile up at 8 and 9, and vanish at 10

We have full population reports for three sets, with PSA's three sub-columns separated out: base grades, half grades and qualified copies. Here is where the qualified copies sit.

In the 1986-87 Fleer basketball set, 6,934 recorded copies carry a qualifier. Of those, 2,860 are 8s and 3,790 are 9s. That is 95.9 per cent of every qualified card in a 132-card set sitting on two rungs of the ladder.

Go down the ladder and they thin out fast. At PSA 6, only 43 copies in the entire set carry a letter - 0.13 per cent of all the sixes. At PSA 5 it is 17.

Go up and they stop. There are 20,394 PSA 10s of the cards in that set and not one of them is qualified. The same is true of the 2,751 tens in 1980-81 O-Pee-Chee and the 2,474 in 1981-82 O-Pee-Chee. Across all three sets, 25,619 tens, no letters.

That is the definition doing its work in both directions. A qualifier marks a card that is excellent except in one place, so it needs a card that is otherwise excellent. At the bottom of the ladder there is no single flaw to isolate, because there are several. At the top there is nothing left to isolate at all.

How often, and it depends enormously on the set

The rate is not a constant. It is closer to a fingerprint of how the cards were made.

• 1980-81 O-Pee-Chee hockey: 1,705 qualified copies in 38,001 recorded, or 4.49 per cent
• 1981-82 O-Pee-Chee hockey: 908 in 34,579, or 2.63 per cent
• 1986-87 Fleer basketball: 6,934 in 502,003, or 1.38 per cent

One card in twenty-two in the 1980-81 O-Pee-Chee set carries a letter. In the 1986 Fleer set it is one in seventy-two.

O-Pee-Chee cut its sheets badly and the reports show it. In that 1980-81 set, 6.36 per cent of all the PSA 8s and 6.16 per cent of all the 9s are qualified. In 1986 Fleer the same figures are 1.46 and 2.56 per cent.

Put another way: if you are buying a PSA 9 of a 1980-81 O-Pee-Chee card, roughly one in sixteen of the nines in existence has a letter after it. For a 1986 Fleer card it is about one in thirty-nine. Worth knowing before you read a listing quickly.

The other column nobody reads

Qualified copies are not the only thing sitting outside the plain numbered ladder. PSA's half grades are in a column of their own too.

They stop at 8.5. In all three reports the half-grade column is empty at 9 and at 10, because PSA does not award a 9.5. In the 1986 Fleer set, 9,146 of the 12,411 half-grade copies - just under three quarters - are 8.5s.

Add the two columns together and you get the share of a set that does not sit on a whole number with no letter after it: 5.68 per cent of 1980-81 O-Pee-Chee, and 3.85 per cent of both 1981-82 O-Pee-Chee and 1986 Fleer.

What PSA does not publish

Three things a buyer would want and cannot get from the grader.

The first is the threshold. OC is defined against a centring standard, and PSA does not publish the tolerance as a number on its grading standards page. It says instead that "a small variance may be permitted on occasion based on the card's overall eye appeal." So the line between a 9 and a 9 with OC is a judgement, not an arithmetic test you can run at home with a ruler.

The second is whether the submitter has a say. Practitioner accounts in the hobby hold that a submitter can ask for no qualifiers, in which case the card comes back with the straight grade it earns rather than the higher qualified one - and those accounts disagree with each other about which codes are mandatory when present. PSA does not publish a policy on this. If the accounts are right, the number on a label is partly a function of a box somebody ticked on a form, which would make two identical cards legitimately different grades. We record that as an open question rather than a fact.

The third is what it costs in the Set Registry. PSA's registry glossary says only that "cards having significant flaws will receive 'qualified' grades" and that "qualifiers may receive deduction points in the Registry." May, and no figure.

What the market does with them

The hobby's rule of thumb is that a qualified card trades somewhere near the straight grade two points below it, so an 8 with OC changes hands at something like 6 money.

We cannot test that here. This site records sales from lot pages, and not one of the sales recorded on any card page so far is a qualified copy. So the rule of thumb stays a rule of thumb, cited rather than confirmed.

What the figures above do support is the other half of it. A qualified 8 is not a damaged card that got lucky. It is a card that met the 8 standard on every count but one, in a population where only one copy in twenty to seventy gets that description at all. Whether that is worth 6 money or 8 money is a question about the specific flaw, and the label tells you which flaw to go and look at.

Why the tables on this site leave them out

Every population table on this site publishes base grades only. No half grades, no qualified copies.

That is a choice, and it makes our totals smaller than PSA's. On the 1986-87 Fleer Mark Aguirre we publish 3,067 copies. PSA's report for that card reads 3,067 base, 88 half grades and 15 qualified - 3,170 in all. PSA's headline figure is 3.4 per cent higher than ours.

The reason is that a column of 3,170 is not a column of comparable objects. It contains 8s, 8.5s and 8s with a stain, and a gem rate calculated against it answers a slightly different question than the one most people are asking.

The same discipline is why the figures in what a published gem rate actually counts come out where they do. Grades are only comparable when you have decided what counts as a grade, and the letters after the number are exactly where that decision has to be made.

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