1921-S Buffalo Nickel.....you Vs. PCGS

@Ty2020b, thank you much, my friend. @TNG nailed the grade first. You did very well with this coin. It fits your collection like a glove, and is a much better example than many of the ugly UNCs roaming around.

Just a general note. The TPGs do undergrade the Buffs that have heavy die polishing. There is an opportunity to snag a half point to a point undergrade with slabbed Buffs. This coin is one of them, and the resulting purchase would have been at least $200-$250 below actual value. For huge condition rarities like 1924-S and 1926-S, that can easily be a $1,000 swing to the good.

I too missed it by a mile...but thanks to FC and his observation shared on this coin will help me in the future. Thanks for posting and expanding my knowledge

FC, what benefit is it to purchase one of these slabbed undergraded coins if everyone looking at them not only see's the grade on the slab but most looking at these coins dont know its undergraded and all they see is what appears to be wear but is actually die polishing.

for the life of me when you describe the locations of the polishing I still cant see any sign of it other than the flatness and what appears to be wear in those areas

The old adage "buy the coin, not the slab" works both ways. Let's take a 1926-S as an example. Suppose it is slabbed as AU-50, but is actually a heavily die polished AU-55. The price of the AU-50 is around $1800-1900. The price of an AU-55 is around $2500-2600. A +$700 swing is pretty real. People building sets checking the four boxes will recognize the true grade. There's an opportunity to flip the coin upward at true grade on a bourse floor. The key is to buy slabbed and sell in hand.

Most flippers crack the coin and sell it raw. I leave it slabbed for my clients. They know how I buy for them and they see what I see in the coins. (We all have decades of history together, so there's that.) For them, the TPG grade is meaningless. The coin is everything.