Grading upside calculator

Guess My Grades

Should you send that card in? Search it, check what it actually sells for, then read the payoff of grading with PSA, BGS, CGC, or TAG at every condition level. This tool never guesses your card's condition for you. It does the math once you have.

Independent tool. Not affiliated with PSA, BGS/Beckett, CGC, TAG, eBay, or PriceCharting. Fees, tiers, and grading criteria change, so figures here are dated snapshots with links to verify. All condition-to-grade odds below come from a rough general model, not this card's actual population data. Full disclaimer at the bottom of the page.
01

Find the card

Start typing a card name. For Pokémon, Magic, and Yu-Gi-Oh! you'll get real matching printings with images to choose from, pulled live from each game's own database, and picking one fills in everything below automatically. Punctuation doesn't matter when searching, but spelling does. Sports cards and other categories don't have a free live database, so those fields are filled in by hand.

02

What it sells for

Pick a card above and the whole table fills itself: the card locks in below with its image, the raw price pulls live from the market, and every company's graded prices start as conservative estimates derived from that raw price. For a quick read, you don't have to type anything. For a card you're serious about, replace the estimates with real sold comps. Each company panel has one-click links for exactly that, and anything you enter switches from italic (estimated) to regular (yours).

03

Eyeballing condition

No calipers, no camera. Just what to look for and how. These are the same four things every company grades on.

Centering

Hold the card at arm's length under even light and compare the border width on opposite sides: left vs. right on front, then top vs. bottom. Do the same on the back, since most companies grade it too, and back centering is often worse. If the borders look identical, you're in great shape. The moment one side is noticeably chunkier, you're already outside the top grade at most companies. 50 / 50, dead center ~65 / 35, visibly off ~80 / 20, badly off

Corners

Check all eight corners (four per side) under strong light, then lightly run a fingertip over each tip. Sharp corners catch the light as one clean point. Worn ones show a tiny pale fray at the tip, or feel rounded instead of pointed. One soft corner among eight is common and often survivable; two or more usually caps the grade hard.

Edges

Tilt the card and sight down each edge like you're aiming down a ruler, rather than looking at it flat. Whitening shows up as tiny pale flecks along the cut edge of the cardboard. It's most visible on cards with dark borders, where the white core underneath has nowhere to hide.

Surface

Use a raking light, meaning a flashlight or lamp held low and off to the side rather than straight on. Scratches, scuffs, and print lines that hide under normal room light jump right out under a raking light. Check both the front and the back, because a clean front doesn't mean a clean back.

Automatic red flags

Creases, bends, stains, water damage, and trimming are more than "low grade" problems. They can trigger a no-grade or "details" result that pays out far worse than any number below. If you can see or feel any of those, treat the "well-loved" row skeptically and consider it a bigger warning than the table shows.
04

The upside, by condition

Pick your row based on the honest look you just gave the card. Each number is the expected payout after fees and shipping, minus what you'd get selling it raw today. Green means grading tends to win at that condition; red means it doesn't.