PCGS Photograde Question

I thought that strike quality was taken into account for the super high grades. Is that not the case?

Eye appeal and luster play a big role too. They're tough to judge in the images but the 67 and 68 coins are probably total knock-outs in hand.

Nope, just a couple decades(or more) of experience with handling tens of thousands of coins.

Anyone who believes in slobbed coins is only kidding themselves. For an expensive but revealing lesson, crack out a dozen 69 or 70 coins and see what they come back as.

Dealers and speculators spend millions of dollars playing the crackout game, and there's enough potential profit to make it worthwhile.

Let's use a little common sense and logic. If an AU coin gets a 63, any no-peek offer for that date has to honor that 63 price for the AU coin. A solid 63 slobbed coin is now only worth the AU price, unless you're dealing in person. This defeats the whole argument for the existence of slobbed coins in the first place, that they could be traded sight unseen.

An extra nice 63 will be cracked out and resubmitted however many times it takes to get a 64. The net result is that slobbed coins are the worst possible coins that squeak by for the grade, plus just plain overgraded stuff that slips by.

Enter "market grading", which is to say that the standard is there are no standards. I read an article by a famous numismatist where he stated that every Saint, even gems, has rub on the knee. Yet we see them graded in various MS grades, which essentially applies market grading, considering everything but the rub.

News flash: Rub = wear, cabinet friction = wear. If that means the nicest Saint grades AU59, then so be it. Calling coins with wear MS changes nothing about the reality of their condition.

I forget whether it was one of the 1913 nickels or 1804 dollars, but I was reading about it, and they mentioned that grading service A proudly approved it an for upgrade from service B, then they gave its history and over the years it went from something like XF40 to MS60, or some other ridiculous 20-point spread.

News flash 2: Coins are not like wine, they rarely improve with age. In fact, the opposite is usually true, even from exposure to light over decades.

The whole thing is ridiculous anyway. Saying a 1913 nickel is 65 instead of 63 doesn't make it worth a cent more. It's valuable because it's one of five known, and the circulated one that was carried for years in a half dollar holder may sell for a higher price if it happens to be offered to the right crowd.

You can't judge luster from a photo, I don't care how good the photographer's skills are.

biggfredd...... excellent post above !

Grading mint state always has and always will require mostly hands-on experience. You can get alot of that at coin shows and dealer's shops. I'm sure some of the guides can help explain different aspects such as luster, bag marking, strike, etc., but you really have to jump in with both feet and get involved to really become proficient at it.

I'm one of the old-school crew I suppose, and began collecting about 30 years before ebay and even the internet was even a pipe dream. It's a shame there is so much dependency on slabbing services in the hobby these days, a bad addiction to overcome when it comes to learning to grade on your own. But I applaud you for taking the initiative. You will develop skills that not many seem to seek out anymore.

Try this link for starters if you haven't already. Several pages of good reading on the grading process overall.

http://www.coingrading.com/gradems1.html