Stefan_W

I usually keep the runs together. The exception is for keys where the value depends a lot on the grade, and where a spine ticks could mean a difference of hundreds of dollars or more. For those books I either have them graded or I put them in top loaders. Since top loaders don't easily fit into my regular PC short boxes they end up in a BCW hard plastic bin.

I capped my PC at 150 slabs and at the end of the month I decide which ones have to exit to make room for others. These are the books that I punted out of my PC when I went through them last night. Each time I do this it gets a little bit harder.

I like it a lot for modern books where you really need a certain grade to make it worthwhile. It is better to take a small hit in a rejection fee than being stuck with a slab that has little value and is impossible to sell. Pros: you save the cost of slabbing books that end up at too low a grade to make it worthwhile, and it is easier and less expensive than cracking and re-submitting books that don't land where you hope Cons: all of the books in a submission have to be at the same pre-screen level, so you basically need to do it in multiples of 25 books

All good, I am not fussed about a few extra days since it is well ahead of the TATs anyway. No huge rush on my end to get the books. The worst part for me about waiting in this stage is I get super curious to see how I did, and so I am continually checking the page to see if the grades are listed. My F5 key takes a big beating.

The moderns are continuing to move faster than the promised TATs, kudos to all of the hard work from the CGC staff that makes this possible! 25 modern pre-screens (9.8) marked as SFG on July 19 2022, moved to G/E/I today Aug 29 2022. I tried a new process where I double checked submissions one last time before shipping out and ended up filtering out books on my own. I am interested to see if this makes a difference in my hit rate.

Deleted comment Nah, not worth it.

Some graders are tougher than others. They are human so I can accept that. I can also accept that I may sometimes think a book is a higher grade than it actually is. The only thing that really grinds me is when a grader makes a note of "moderate staining" to a book where the image on the inside of a cover shows through to the outside. I had a couple of books where that happened, most recently an ASM 315. The book, which was a 9.6 all the way, was dropped all the way down to an 8.5 for this phantom flaw. cracked the slab and saw that there was no actual staining and I was simply out the cost of grading with no recourse. I also double checked images of existing 9.8 copies of that book and they pretty much all have the inside cover showing through on the white of the outside cover, so I know some graders know how to grade this book accurately. I know changes can be tough with a lot of graders employed by CGC, but I would be really REALLY happy if a memo or something like that went out to check to see if it is actual staining before knocking the grade down and leaving a note saying a book is stained. Assuming learning is continual this type of approach should be doable to prevent more of the same error in the future.

My view on this topic is pretty straightforward. First, yes CGC should have given these books a green label to begin with. Second, I am very glad to see that CGC changed their stance to the correct one. A lot of times when mistakes like this are made companies continue to refuse to acknowledge it or deal with it. It is better to eat some crow than triple or quadruple down on a mistake. Aside from this I don't care much one way or another since I do not chase books like this.

My 7/19/22 modern pre-screen is still in SFG but based on this I expect it to hit grading very soon.

This event sounds like a lot of fun. Being an older fellow I am not generally looking at ways to add more social media in my life, but I may create an account to join in if I have time. I heard of Whatnot before but never tried it.

Sorry, but no dealer should be listing a raw as a 9.8. I am glad to hear you had a good experience but I would avoid the seller like the plague and recommend others do so as well. FWIW I cap raw books as NM (9.4) if there are no flaws that I can see, and NM- (9.2) if I can see one tiny flaw.

And marked as shipped today with the shipment date set for tomorrow, Aug 11th. That is about a week in total which is extremely fast, well done!

Yup, that is completely normal. With no insider knowledge whatsoever, my best guess is doing it this way cuts down on people flooding them with calls to try to catch the order before shipping if they dont like the grades or something along those lines. In that way it makes perfect sense in my mind. Having said that, I am not good at waiting for things so the time between QC and shipping is usually torture for me as I F5 the page continually.

There is only so much equipment that is used to encapsulate the books. I am ok with waiting my turn.

3 ME books hit SFG on Aug 3rd Moved into G/E/I and then Q/C today, Aug 9th Based on experience they may sit at this stage for a few days, but man that it still fast.

Thank you for putting in all of the work on this, you rock!

Congratulations! That is amazing.

Ended up with 4 this round. Too bad my round three sucked beyond belief, otherwise I could have had a respectable showing in this one.

Overstreet still charges money for their stuff?

I was in the mix but this round completely did me in. Oh well, there is always the next grading contest

A few others, by request from a friend:

Lots and lots of great moderns in the last order, this is just a small sampling of the highlights.

Congratulations to all the winners, well deserved!

A group of 25 slow track moderns SFG - 20 June 2022 G/E/I 27 July 2022 Q/C July 28 2022 All finalized, marked as shipped for Mon Aug 1. I was stressed about this group since the quality of books was higher than I normally send. I ended up doing all right. My estimate was 12-15 books would hit 9.8 and it turned out that 13 did. Most of the ones that missed I knew were not 9.8. There was only one head scratcher in the bunch (and 8.0 that I figured would be a 9.2 or maybe a 9.4), and the other misses were within one step of where I figured. I am pretty happy with this overall, and I may not have any crack and resubs this time around depending on what I see. The grading seemed really reasonable which leads me to believe that the misses were just things I did not notice when I sent them in.

I sent about 150 books through CCS but that was a year and a half ago. At that time everything rolled through really fast and the quality of results was about the same as using any presser out there. I was very happy with it at that time, but I cant really speak to where things are at now. I've since moved to pressing my own comics, and that has given me the best results. The biggest benefit is that I can easily inspect each book after pressing to see how things came out during pressing, and inspect again as I am submitting to catch any "unpressing" that may have happened. The reality is that no pressing service, whether CCS or private, is going to put as much time and care into my books as I do.