Sports Card Investor Graded the Same Cards at PSA, BGS, CGC and SGC — and PSA and CGC Do Not Publish the Same Top Grade
On September 13, Sports Card Investor published a video titled "I Graded the SAME Cards with PSA, BGS, CGC & SGC... The Results Were SHOCKING." It is a familiar argument, and the four companies' own published documents explain a good deal of why it does not resolve: they are not all measuring toward the same ceiling.
Two Different Tens
Start with the top of each scale, as each company states it.
PSA's published grading standards define one perfect grade: "A PSA Gem Mint 10 card is a virtually perfect card," with four perfectly sharp corners, sharp focus and full original gloss, free of staining — though PSA notes that "an allowance may be made for a slight printing imperfection."
CGC Cards publishes two separate tens. Its Pristine 10 is "a virtually flawless card to the naked eye," requires 50/50 centering and "flawless color and registration," and is described as "reserved exclusively for the best of the best — cards that are flawless under 10-times magnification." Every card that earns it gets a distinct Pristine label. Below that sits CGC's Gem Mint 10, defined as "a card that has received a 10 grade overall; however, one of the grading criteria does not meet the requirements of a Pristine 10." CGC then adds a Mint+ 9.5 beneath both.
Analysis: a card can therefore be a ten at two companies and mean two different things, or be a CGC Gem Mint 10 precisely because it fell short of that company's own higher ten. Before any grader has looked at a corner, the scales have already forked. This is a comparison of published definitions, not a judgment about which company is stricter — nothing in either document supports ranking them.
PSA Says the Quiet Part in Its Own Standards
The most useful document in this argument is PSA's, because it does not claim the process is purely mechanical. "While it's true that a large part of grading is objective (locating print defects, staining, surface wrinkles, measuring centering, etc.), the other component of grading is somewhat subjective," the standards read. PSA goes further: "the graders reserve the right, based on the strength or weakness of the eye appeal, to make a judgment call on the grade of a particular card," and "at the grader's sole discretion, a small variance may be permitted on occasion based on the card's overall eye appeal."
PSA illustrates it with a card of its own choosing — a 1955 Topps Sandy Koufax sitting on the edge of the acceptable centering guidelines for a given grade — and explains that eye appeal can decide which side of the line it lands on.
That is a grading company stating in writing that eye appeal can decide which of two grades a borderline card receives. Any experiment that sends the same cards to four companies is testing that margin.
The Industry Has Already Priced This In
The clearest evidence that companies expect each other to disagree is that they sell products built around it. SGC's own services page lists crossovers and reviews alongside raw-card grading, and warns that "orders will have longer turnaround times if Crossovers are submitted WITHOUT a minimum grade" — a crossover being the act of sending an already-slabbed card to a different company. PSA's standards note that a "Minimum Grade (MG) option is only available on select service levels."
Analysis: a minimum-grade instruction only makes sense if the submitter believes the next company might come back lower. Both companies have turned that expectation into a checkbox, which is the industry conceding the point in product design rather than in a press release.
Beckett's structure differs again: its current submission page lists "Base (with subgrades), Standard, and Express" as the services now available, so subgrades are a named part of the product rather than an add-on to a single number. The same page states that Base and Standard submissions are open and that pricing is unchanged, which is the follow-up to CASE #0320 — Beckett's digital platforms remain offline while submissions run through a temporary form.
What the Channel Is Doing With It
This is not a one-off for Sports Card Investor. Its public feed shows the same thread continuing three days after this video: a September 16 upload titled "3 GRADERS. SAME CARD. 3 DIFFERENT GRADES??" The four-company test came first; the three-company version followed within the week.
What the video finds is the video's to tell, and the case for it is on the channel rather than here — the title promises results and readers should go get them. What can be established from outside is the frame: the experiment is pointed at a real seam, and the companies have documented the seam themselves.
Verdict: worth watching, because the premise is stronger than a stunt. PSA concedes a subjective component in its own published standards, CGC publishes two separate tens, Beckett sells subgrades as a service level, and both PSA and SGC let you set a minimum grade before a card crosses over. The same card landing on different numbers is not an anomaly in that system. It is the system working as documented.
Channel: Sports Card Investor
