Ride the Tiger

On 4/26/2024 at 1:06 PM, LordRahl said:

100% it was not market manipulation. I have sold books prior to the covid madness that went for literally 5x their normal selling price. I got paid. There was no market manipulation. As someone else pointed out CL doesn't get reported to GPA or any other sales tracking site... hard to manipulate a market when only the people that bid on the book know about it (typically). I know it got called out here and now more people know about it but that couldn't have been an expected outcome for someone "manipulating the market". Sometimes this happens with auctions, 2 guys really want a book and throw in crazy bids at the end. It's an outlier and likely not repeatable but also not market manipulation.

Why don't ComicLink sales get applied to the GPA? A site dedicated to comic sales alone and they get excluded?

On 5/1/2024 at 3:20 PM, 1Cool said:

You're not wrong but that is not how rankings go in any competition.  If he finished the competition right now there would be side contest to determine which one of the people with 11 gets 1st, who gets 2nd and the loser of that group would get 3rd.  The people who you refer to as being in 2nd place would be content to share 4th and 5th place since the top three spots are taken by the people with 11.  

I see what you're saying but that's if the contest were ended right now. Way I see it 25% of the contest remains. Any of the top 10 could just fall out of contention with a poor final round. Someone from below with a near perfect round could jump ahead of the others and claim a top spot. That's how I'm looking at it.

On 5/1/2024 at 12:47 PM, JohnH19 said:

There’s five people ahead of him. He’s tied for sixth.

Three people with the score of 11 are tied for 1st. Two people with the score of 12 are tied for 2nd. Which means 13 points are tied for 3rd.

On 5/1/2024 at 12:19 PM, 1Cool said:

I'm in 6th place (or at least tied).  Things get stressful when you are not out of it in the last round  

Unless I'm reading it wrong you're tied for third right now.

On 5/1/2024 at 12:16 PM, Get Marwood & I said:

Bit of good news though - CGC have announced that they'll be grading buckets in the future. This one's an 8.0: 

That bucket would never get a blue label you can tell someone tried to push the dents back in shape.

It would be interesting to send the same book to all 3 grading companies to see what grades they would give it. The SW 8 that is.

Trying to come up with a sensible plan for 6th place is nuts. I would say that allowing all the 6th place finishers (before the 1,2,3 tiebreaker) to participate in that competition makes the most sense. 

I saw the rusty staples on SW 8 and figured it was a moderate defect only because the damage wasn't enough that the staples were blown thru. To me that's the most difficult decision at times. When does a moderate defect become a major one.

On 4/30/2024 at 12:16 PM, CGC Mike said:

Someone has scored 4 bullseyes and has a total score of 1 for this round.

That is farging great!

So Mike tell us some interesting facts about the current round thus far. Like someone scored 4 bulleyes. Or someone missed a single grade by 14 points.

On 4/28/2024 at 10:21 AM, trmoore54 said:

Can anyone explain what relegates the Superman 50 to 8.0?  Looks generally 9.0/plus to me.  What are the issues.  Apparently I am blind.  

That staple tear takes it out of anything with NM in it. The book overall looked pretty good to me so I went with 8.5 assuming it had to be the highest grade allowed for a book with that defect. I was close.

Finally bit the bullet and registered on Comiclink. Ebay is so dead for selling these days.

On 4/25/2024 at 11:19 PM, Stefan_W said:

Ok, the hammer price was even worse. Am I missing something, or did two rich guys get competitive and lost their minds on this one? 

The 2 people losing their minds is surely a possibility but my guess is a small attempt at market manipulation. As I look thru ebay completed items there are so many sales that don't make sense. Slabbed books selling for twice their value. 

On 4/25/2024 at 9:30 PM, scburdet said:

Is it a good sign or a bad one when you read Mike's notes & can't see the defect mentioned?

 

I pay attention to Mike's notes but in the end, if I can't see that defect I don't deduct for it.

Ok grades in cuz I wuz shamed. 

I just like to take my time. Don't want to rush the grades then realize the whole book is covered in tartar sauce.

I'm gonna work on that procrastination problem tomorrow. 

A bloodbath? This is probably the contest where we have to grade a book shot with a bow and arrow.... with the arrow still stuck in the book.

If you are calling the book 1.0 but you mostly overgrade, then the book is -1 ? 

Right off this website.

On 4/16/2024 at 9:26 AM, MatterEaterLad said:

Yes, you caught me. I totally made it up. 

Six years ago a friend's husband passed away and left her with a nice collection of SA books, including Hulk 1, and FF 1-5. I connected her with Steve when he was still at that other place and he went through her collection and recommended which ones to have graded (and he later graded them). About 18 months ago she decided to sell and both Steve and I recommended she have the books cross-graded to CGC cases, which we both felt would do better at auction (Steve had left the other place). The grades on all of her books came back .5 to 2.5 points lower. She was pretty upset, at Steve, at CGC, and basically the whole comic world, which she didn't know much about. Part of her frustration was because after she saw comic prices soar, they had plummeted by the time her books were sold. Steve's explanation to her was what I mentioned earlier. I'm not saying that's what's going on, but that's what he said. From the books I've had graded in the past two years, CGC definitely seems to be in one of their tighter grading periods. I hate that they've had such variance over the years. If I had the money to burn, I'd have a set of 100 books regraded each year to appraise the consistency/inconsistency of grading. Would they nail it every time? Would it be a hot mess? We'll never know because there's no audit of how they grade books. 

Thanks for clearing it up. 

On 4/15/2024 at 3:01 PM, Nick Furious said:

1:30 AM.  Hotel lobby bar.  

Was it in a public forum? Did you hear him say it at a con? Or did you make it up?

On 4/15/2024 at 11:41 AM, MatterEaterLad said:

I had similar results recently, with a bunch of Copper Age books. Was hoping for a minimum of 9.2 and the books all came back in the 8.5-7.0 range with "light creasing, light spine stress."

The grading inconsistency has always been annoying, but now it's ridiculous. Borock has said that he thinks it's to push people to use CGC's pressing services.

When and where did he say this?

New England Comics