A Few Final Natty Thoughts

The best deal I made all week was one I did not even know I made.  I have a pair of 1965 Anteojito cards of Pele and Ali. An Argentinean publishing company issued cut-out cards in a few of its monthly issues. Several of the cards are athletes, mostly locals, but Pele and Ali were included as the global icons that they are.  Anteojitos are known to both soccer and boxing fanatics but finding them is a real chore; it took me years of scouring obscure sources to get them. None of the slabbers have graded any cards from the issue.   Normally, SGC is my go-to with rare and obscure boxing.  After SGC punted on a couple of semi-obscure issues recently, and not wanting to spend the tremendous cognitive effort it takes to get PSA to move their asses on anything out of the mainstream, I decided to go outside the Evil Empire and see if CGC would grade my Anteojitos. 

Something really helpful that CGC had at the National was a grader on duty who would consult on potential submissions.  Little in grading is more irritating than sending in a card and having it rejected and returned as ungradable for a reason that can be readily addressed with a little research, so this was a nice way of bypassing that situation.  The CGC grader on duty said that they had no problem with the issue per se but recommended that I gather up and send them the research on the issue to help them.  He also told me that the Pele could get a numerical grade because the cut lines were there but that the Ali would be an “A” at best because it was raggedly cut; I knew that already and was fine with it, I just wanted the card in a holder. 

I gave them the cards and when I got home, I sent in a customer service inquiry about where to send the data.  Another thing positive to say for CGC is that I got a clear, accurate response within 24 hours and after I sent in the data, an acknowledgment that the information I sent in had been received and would be passed on to the graders.  It is a nice touch in an increasingly unresponsive industry.  Whether they grade them...we will see.  

Anyhow, when I placed the order with CGC at the show, the rep handed me a packet with a slabbed promo card as a thanks.  I opened it later that day while taking a break at a friend’s booth.  It was some sort of TCG I’ve never heard of. Ugly as hell and of no interest to me but I’ve learned the hard way to never, ever just discard a promo card, so I tossed it in my bag and forgot about it. Yesterday, I was cleaning up my desk and I came across it.  I looked it up on eBay.  I saw one with a $2500 BIN that had sold for some lesser best offer price.  eBay’s research tool for sellers lets you peek at the actual sales prices on offers, so I took a look.  The card sold for $800.  I immediately put mine up for $800 and it was gone by the time I woke up this morning, at full price. The ultramodern end of the hobby is nuts.  CGC basically handed me an $800 casino chip for my $59 order, and I cashed it.  Then again, bitcoin is $120k, so making up something stupid and selling it to gullible Americans is not limited to this thing of ours. Ironically, the VIP promo packs from the VIP package, which used to be the bomb at the National, turned out to be worth very little.  

In thinking more about my experience on Tuesday night in that private buying session, I realize that I nearly got pantsed by a grinder troll.  A confluence of mistakes and conditions led to my making a lousy deal that would have been disastrous had I not gotten my money back on the counterfeit cards. I will share my process so you can learn from (and laugh at) my mistakes.

I traded with this guy every year at the National pre-COVID.  My initial mistake was thinking that my past experience in a trading session would translate to a purchasing scenario.  Although they were exhausting, I was pleased with the outcomes of my trades with the difficult sumbitch because of how little I was into the cards I traded.  The nutty trade values he ascribed to his cards didn’t faze me because I knew the cost of what I was trading to him and I assessed the deal that way.  Buying is just a different dynamic; I ignored the fact that I would be into the cards for whatever I paid for the cards.  

Now, I knew this guy was a grinder but I wasn’t deterred because I assumed that because he is in his seventies I could outlast him.  I did not know at the time we met that he had been in a similar trading session the night before, had gone to bed in the wee hours of the morning, and had slept most of the day. While I was working on effectively no sleep for 18 hours on my travel day, he had only been awake for seven hours. When we got into the depths of the evening and into the early morning, I wore down and he kept going. I recall now that I became so frustrated around 12:30 at night that I became very impatient.  That should have been my cue to walk away because ignoring your fatigue is a great way to rat-fuck a deal.  I don’t know anyone who makes good decisions when he is worn out; studies have shown that fatigue impairs drivers as much as drinking.  Rather than respecting my own limits, I stupidly pressed on. 

As he dragged out the storytelling and the bullshitting and the commentary deep into the evening and deeper into the morning, I began to crack. By the time we got to 1 o’clock in the morning, and I was ready to fall down with fatigue, he pounced.  

I was so impatient to get a deal done and go to bed that I did not listen to his stories.  Big mistake.  People will tell you volumes about who they are...if you listen.  One trick that this grinder troll employs regularly is to ‘bribe’ someone with a trinket at the start; usually a celebrity whose autograph he wants.  He told me story after story of using these sorts of handouts to get signatures but when he handed me a picture of a boxer I collect and said “oh here’s a gift for you happy birthday,” I did not see it for what it was: a technique for disarming me.  

One of the characteristics of a grinder troll is that they never relent. That certainly was the case on Tuesday night. My troll refuses to use electronic devices and derides everyone else for using “the computer” when it comes to analyzing prices and data. He proclaims, loudly and often, that he doesn’t know the information about the current market, and that we all have an advantage over him because we use “the computer”.  I assumed that because this man said had no real grasp on the current market, he would naturally tend to lowball his items. In fact, the opposite was true on most cards. He established a ridiculous price on his items, stuck to it, and didn’t want to hear any kind of contrary evidence. 

About all I can say on that front is that when you encounter someone with preconceived and unfounded valuations and they don’t come down from them quickly, just walk away. Is not worth your time or your effort to try and change his mind.  

As the evening wore on and he continued talking the same rap about trading and dealing over and over while avoiding actually looking at the cards we were trying to work with, I decided to make a final offer and walk away if he said no. I threw a last offer at him.  He declined it and rather than leave, I kept talking, which completely destroyed my credibility.  Sometimes, a final offer has to be a final offer.  When my ultimatum turned out to be hollow, I signaled to him that he could keep rearranging the terms of the deal again and again and again and pull me closer to his pricing structure and I would not walk away.  That is precisely what he did. He ended up selling me half of what I wanted for what I wanted to pay for everything.

In closing the deal I violated my own main tenet of negotiating: I forgot that a bad transaction is worse than no transaction. I was eager to get my week of deals moving, and that was my Achilles’ heel.

Now it turned out that two of the major cards that he sold me were counterfeits. I’ve addressed that in an earlier column so I won’t go into it again in detail. The contrast of me tired and me feeling rested was really sharp when he finally met me to give me back my money on the counterfeits. He went into his rap and pulled out all sorts of crap that he wanted to give me instead of my money, but I was not vulnerable to his tactics.  I just steered the discussion back on topic until I got my refund.  

Hope my dumbass decisions help you make better decisions.