Lake Worth Show Promoter Crashes Out

Hello and welcome to the Ball Card Show. This is Season 5, Episode 29 of the Esports Podcast. For the Esports Collector. I'm Jason Otero. I'm Gary LeMaster. I'm a little fired up today about what we're talking about. We've got a lot to go over, but the one thing that caught both of our eyes the most this week not only got our interest, but it got our full attention. Well, it's speaking directly into the space that we spend a lot of time. Yeah, it should be a fun little spirited convo here in a little while. Before we do that, can we talk about the idiots responding to the grading advice that we offered? By the way, how are you, Gary? I'm good. I'm good. It was a good weekend. We celebrated your son's big birthday. 16. Feeling nice and old. Going to be driving no time. We had a nice, solid labor day, and now we're here with you guys, so yeah. Back to the idiots. We offered very basic one-on-one advice on grading, and most people were appreciative of that. Yeah, we talked about a centering tool that's really cheap that'll save you a lot of money and wasted grading costs. My favorite comment was somebody jumped in, and all we were saying was, there's people entering the hobby this year, and they don't know exactly what they're doing with grading, so they're being told, just send everything off. Just send everything off. It's detrimental to a lot of people. That was an interesting thing to argue with, but we did have somebody that really got into it with me, and then they flexed their numbers, and it was a 66% gem rate. I was like, keep doing what you're doing. My favorite on the centering conversation was multiple people were like, you can just eyeball it, and they weren't being sarcastic. They were being serious, and I think my response was, that's how you get sevens and eights. It just goes to show that people on social media- Gary, what do you know about it? Do you even do breaks? ... will argue anything with anyone. What wax are you even opening? How could you possibly know what you're talking about if you haven't dropped seven grand on Silhouette already? What's wrong with you? Which, by the way, cool product. Price point, real silly. Let's talk about that first. Okay. Panini drops Silhouette. Obviously, we're late into the little sunset of the license for basketball, and the product is awesome. Yeah, but here's the questioning point for me. If they have had all of this really cool game you stuff just sitting in their warehouses, why in the hell have we been getting Dick's Sporting Good patches on cards for the last four years? We've been paying for them? Yeah, I guess. And then breaking enabled that, you to push the market because you can fractionally ... Well, you're not paying for the whole box. You're paying for a team. You're not paying for the whole Dick's Sporting Goods jersey. No, it's a story of what could have been. This is the premium product people wanted. This has the type of stuff people would place enough value on to spend more than the average hobby box on. Why has this stuff not been in National Treasures or Flawless? Compare it to Immaculate. Oh, Immaculate's horrible. Did you see? Have you seen Immaculate football get ripped this week? My favorite is it's supposed to be like the Super Bowl trophy, but it looks like a weird keyhole. Yeah, well, and more importantly, the Lombardi. I have not seen a single person ... Now, granted, I have not watched full cases of it get ripped, but I have not seen a single person not get absolutely torched. I watched Pac-Man open six boxes of this stuff at a, what are they, $1,200, $1,300 a box? Well, it was a product that the MSRP was crazy reasonable and they knew it, right? The secondary purchase would be ... But there's a little bit of a range on it now. I was at an LCS yesterday that had them for right at about a grand, but yeah. Let's call it a grand. Not cheap, not cheap. A grand a box. So 6K ripping these six boxes, the best card that was pulled out of six boxes might have been a $200 card. Might have been. That's bad. Are you talking about Immaculate still? Yeah, I am. Okay, sorry. I thought you were on to Silhouette. I was like, I liked it. No, no, no. I'm talking about the Immaculate product. Silhouette's like a $1,200 product right now. But you get eight cards, one auto, seven game used. That's not bad. The vintage buyers hear the first half of this episode and they're like, not my problem. Hey, speaking of that. Speaking of vintage. Not my problem. I'm decked out with vintage today. You are. I actually want to shout somebody out. We don't do this a ton, but this Gottmantl shirt, bonkers cards, Gordy. Now here's what I would like to say. There are so many people that are not lifelong collectors that have just gotten the hobby, love vintage. But I swear for many people, it feels like they're gatekeeping the information on what's the current market. And they'd be like, well, the comps say, whoa. This is a great resource. Bonkers, they go live on TikTok. They run a lot of auctions. It's a great way to see high grade stuff, really cool stuff, rare stuff. But there's a lot of the bread and butter vintage of the key stars. And you've got to get a feel what people are paying now. Also just a wealth of information there. I've never been asked for, I don't know if he's ever watched a single episode of what we do. It doesn't matter. He gives good content. If you're in the vintage market or want to learn more about it, go give bonkers cards a follow. TikTok, big following. And then I assure you, we're not the first ones to find them. And a lot of people are going to know about it because the content is just really, really good and honest. And I don't ever feel like somebody is trying to pump something up. It's just, hey, isn't this neat? On top of that, dad dropped this off for me. That's a pretty cool one. He was very proud that he got that for you. Yeah, absolutely. A real fun baseball league team out of San Juan, Puerto Rico, where my family is from. Really cool. All right, let's get rolling. Some big cards sold. I feel like this is like a highlight every week when we kick off the news. When you're in a boom cycle, it's always fun to watch what the high end market's doing. Yeah. Last week we talk about a $13 million sale, got the exquisite dual logo, man. Is the card worth that? What does the big whale money coming into this market mean? Should we all panic, freak out, or none of the above? And then Caitlin's one of one, by the way, likely not playing the rest of this year. Correct. Goes off for over $500K. I want to think it was like $514K plus buyer's premium. This was the rookie of the year inscription, right? Yes. Was this card already sold once and it got graded? No, I think that this card is a different one. This is the first sale. There's multiple. Oh, it's one of the other manufacturers. Yeah, gotcha. $500K. That happened. Then, showing a little love to the market, we've been talking about- This was the more interesting one to me. Yeah, go ahead. No, so PMGs, if you're not aware, if you're new and you only do ultra modern, PMGs were introduced by Skybox Flair back in the mid-90s, and there were two or three levels to them depending on the set. You had non-numbered ones, you had greens, you had reds. I believe the reds were numbered to 50, the greens were numbered to 15. The 1997 Metal Universe Green PMG Barry Sanders in a PSA 8, which I'm wanting to say is the highest, if not the highest, there might be one higher out there as far as grading goes. These things were full foil. They're tough grades. I sold on Fanatics Collect about four or five days ago for $372,000 plus a 20% buyer's premium, so the buyer is in that card for about $440,000. That PMG market has been heating up for a while. It hasn't been cold. No, but the side of it that's really been crazy is the basketball side. You find a common, who was the big center for the Bulls? Will Purdue. A Will Purdue red PMG beat to heck is going to give you a 3K raw, 4K raw. The basketball side has been dumb for a while, but now we're seeing it start to take shape in the football market. Barry is super collectible, but I think you will see more of these start to hit the market and new records. That's the highest sale of a running back card ever. Yeah. Yeah, 440K. I'm glad it was him. But to the point here, you see these sales. You see the sale last week. You heard us talk about the Clemente PSA 9 rookie sale. The high-end market is going crazy right now, but it also goes to that dichotomy we talked about a couple weeks ago. For years and years, value boxes were a staple at card shows. You still see some, but I'd say it's half of what it was even a year or two ago. There's just not a ton out there. I used to have two or three value boxes on my table at all times. I'm down to a single two row, and it might be going away soon because I only sell two or three cards out of it every single week, and it's better to just throw those on eBay. I do think that part of what we're experiencing, we've all talked about it, everybody's been saying, is there's a boom, there's a boom. You got all of these celebrities getting involved, massive cards, and what we're seeing is the top end of the high-end market is popping off, and it's becoming a thing where there's status involved because it's becoming more cross-culturally cool, like across just this hobby into other spaces. It's culturally relevant to collect these super high-end pieces, and when you have some big investors coming in and trying to corner a piece of this market, it does affect everything. I do want to point out, this seems to be very different in a few ways from what we saw during the COVID boom. Yes. The first thing that I noticed as somebody that does a high-volume, low-end store is, sure, there's maybe a little bit of an uptick with the volume of sales of low-end over the last couple months, maybe. Summer's a tough time to gauge that off of eBay because it is a little slower, not always, but most of the time. Almost always. Shows, too. But you are not selling your $5 cards for $10 and $15 on a snap like you were during COVID. No. That's what happened. Everybody was doing it, and there were a lot of people scared to buy three-figure cards, and so that low-end market was swelling, multiplying, and there's a ton of people that built their business because they had five or six monster boxes full of that stuff that ended up selling for $10, $15, $20, where they were in it for $0.50 over the years, and that was enough to get the money rolling. 2019 Mosaic Basketball, I'll never forget the base MVP cards. You would get $7, $8 for the base Steph Curry. This was in Facebook print sales. They lied to us about that one, though. Remember? They said they were short-printed. This is a short-printed product. You're not going to see this. You would put up Facebook claim sales, and that stuff would just, as fast as you posted it, gone. Yeah. What was it? Zion Hoops Winners Raw were like $20. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was nuts. So I don't see that happening as much, and I'm somebody that's selling a lot of the low-end market online. I'm not doing it at shows. I know there's people that still crush on value boxes. My hunch is it's still a bit of a grind, and the boom has mostly impacted the higher end of the mid-range on up from there. I find that a little bit interesting. So is that an artificial boom, or what do those numbers mean to the average collector? Let's start there. I think it means, very simply, this. There are two things that can be true at once. We talk about that all the time. We hear people say all the time, this is a junk wax 2.0, junk wax, and there's some validity to that. But here's where there's not validity to it. The difference between now and then is that then there were nothing but base cards, with the occasional numbered to 10,000 card to chase. Now they're printing a whole lot of base cards, but they're creating scarcity with numbered cards, with autos, with low numbered or low print count, lower print count case hits. So that's why I think we're seeing that disparity. There may be close to the same amount of base cards happening now as were happening then, but there's other stuff to chase, not just stars. Back in the junk wax era, Greg Jeffries, 1988, Donruss was a $10 card. That's a lot of money in 1989. It's a $50 card now. And there were millions of them because there weren't parallels to chase. Now we've got this other stuff. We've got higher end products. So the money is gravitating towards the things that people perceive will hold value long term. They don't perceive that these base cards are going to hold value long term. Can we put on our tinfoil hats real quick? Sure. It's one of my favorite things to do. It is. Come on, put yours on. I don't like it. What if I told you the best thing that could possibly happen for card manufacturers is for the ultra massive hits out of products to become the highlight of collecting for the foreseeable future? Because yes, you're getting cooked on this $500 box. And guess what? Next month, it's probably going to happen again. But eventually, maybe. Eventually, maybe you hit the lottery. And that's what we're starting to see. It's a lottery ticket. Yeah. Fractional, you know, the breaking is going to, I feel like it's so easy to be like in a podcast and just say, I hate breaking. But I feel like it's creating a price point of entry where it is more affordable to chase after that. I just think that it is no coincidence that we're seeing that pop off at the same time that value on product release seems to be diminishing. Yeah, I don't disagree. But again, it's just that dichotomy that there is a perceived value in the bigger stuff in the new product. And there's no value given to the base stuff. Let me ask you a question, though. If that exquisite patch, which is not the best example, and the PMG isn't really either, the Caitlyn probably would be. But if that exquisite patch ran again next week, do you think there's any chance it touches $10 million? Probably. I disagree. You don't think? Do you think there were multiple people bidding on that to get it up to $13 million? I believe that was a marketing purchase. So you think they were shilling it themselves? I didn't say that. So if there were multiple people bidding in order to get it to $13 million, that means there were at least probably two or three people. I'm just saying I didn't say that. that. I understand that you didn't. Oh, so you didn't say that. Okay. I got it. Um, but it's interesting to try to make sense of it in the past. You know, the last boom, we would say, all right, well, there seems to be like a good opportunity here in this situation. Um, the only thing that I think it would impact us in any way is if a really big card walks up, we may be, maybe would take a little more. Let's say that's a big car that walks up and it's got three comps in the last five years. We're probably going to consider that, like, if it's the right type of stuff and similar to what the bigger stuff is, that's moving, you may be able to pay a little stronger. You may be able to reach a little further with it. If it hasn't sold for a while. Yeah. I wouldn't do that with a $50 card. I wouldn't do that with a $500 card. No, but if you can get a PMG based off of a four-year-old comp, you should. I guess that's what I'm trying to say. So if you're, if you're in the space, maybe you take chances on some bigger cards. Um, if you don't have a lot of comps, it's something that seems to be on the rise. Then you may be able to pay a little stronger. No, it seems kind of obvious, but you know, we've got to make something of what we're seeing with all these big cards moving. Yeah, for sure. Um, all right, let's jump into something that this is going to be fun guys. Can I set this up before you read it? All right. So Jason sends me a text the other day and uh, it has a two pictures on the text and we're going to show these to you on the screen as Jason reads the one. Um, there's a show in South Florida, the Lake Worth sports cards and collectible show and the promoter of this show really got to be in his bonnet about something. That's good. And it has not turned out the way that he hoped that it would. So Jason, take it away. All right. So this post was August 8th. So you know, this, this has been a few weeks. Um, I want to do a little more digging and it appears that now the page for the Lake Worth sports cards and collectible show, if you're not following it for more than 24 hours, you can't even comment on it. A lot of information has been stripped away. Luckily the internet still exists and the way back machine, the Polish club that this is taking place at, it looks like the person putting together his name is John Shudell. Um, it looks like that name has been wiped from just about everywhere else, but his profile picture is the same as the Lake Worth sports cards collectible show. So we can only assume that he's tucked his tail and he's running at this point. Um, but the reason that I'm saying this is because we have been in many shows where we felt this same persona without ever being at this show. I do think it is a thing that's happening more than we realize. Let me just jump in. This was a Facebook post and he started out very friendly. Good morning everyone. So you know, it's a good morning. Yeah, it's a good morning. Then it gets fun. So just read this bad boy. Good morning everyone. Over the last few months I've noticed an epidemic happening at card shows in South Florida. It seems a lot of people, not just kids, feel that they can walk into a card show with a box of cards, find another customer and go up front and make deals without buying a table. I actually caught two guys buying and selling cards in the bathroom. I do not give a shit how you reword it or explain it. When you come into a card show as a customer and think you can buy or sell to other customers, that is all caps effing stealing! Exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point, exclamation point. Before we go any further, this has got to be a boomer. Way too many all caps and punctuation. That is all that it is, period. Pieces of crap that want to win the lottery without buying a ticket. My dealers are paying for a table for the opportunity to buy and sell cards. These mother effers, by the way, plus mark to make sure he doesn't say it, walk in here, pay nothing and take sales away from my dealers. I talked it over with the Polish club and my security. We decided that if we catch another customer dealing with another customer in any way, we will throw them both, both of them out. If they do it again, they will be banned. The problem is that I cannot spend all day watching them, but security can. Here it comes. The inmates do not run the prison. I do. I will protect my dealers no matter what. We will have signs up at my next show. I'm sorry, people, but this needs to stop. If we don't immediately pause and salute this soldier and thank him for his service to all of us dealers, come on, man. He is willing to kick people out and ban them from your shows to save you money. Yeah. All right. There's a lot to unpack here. A few people have talked about it. Gary and I, here's what I want to say. There are things where we are not going to be the most experienced experts in. One of them, high-end carts. I'm talking like five figures and up. We don't mess with a lot of that. We'd have to buy it so right and we're risk averse. We can give advice what we think is happening, but that's not our space. You know what we do know? Shows. Local small shows like this, this small one. Yeah. Let's point that out as well. Just for point of clarification. Now, again, I wasn't able to get a hold of the person that can't be named, but apparently seems to be maybe a guy named John. And we did see a picture of the inside of one of the shows. Yeah. Would you guess what? 60 tables? Maybe 80, 60 to 80. Less than 100. Yeah. Which I'll be honest, security at that size. That's a good investment. Is it just a dude named Jim with concealed and carry? Probably. Yeah. But do him and John have walkie talkies? I would almost guarantee it. I would almost guarantee it. And one of them carries a mag light just because they remember it back in the day. I'm sorry. I'm hot here. Yeah. I know. My point is we know this scene very, very well because we're actually set up 40 to 45 weekends a year paying our bills, doing, and I would say 40% of the shows we do are this size. Yeah, for sure. So we do a lot of the smaller ones too. We're not just going to the big ones that you see all the influencers at. So we understand this world. So I have a lot of strong opinions about this, but I'm not the only one with opinions. Gary's in this show too. I'm going to let Gary get this started. What's your initial take on this? Also, by the way, the sandwich board basically they'll be thrown out of that as well. My initial take was that I understand the frustration, but this is probably an overreaction. How so? What do you understand? I understand the frustration of being, this promoter obviously has two things happening. One, he's a control freak that's evidenced by what's happening in this whole thing, especially the inmates do not run the prison. I do comment. The second thing that's happening is it's also somebody who appears at least on the surface to actually care about his customers, which are the dealers, right? A promoter has two jobs, get people to the show and provide a safe space for his dealers that are paying him to transact business. So I think on some level there is some care for the dealers in this situation. However, this is not the appropriate response to that. Yeah. I'm going to take a guess here and I'm assuming, and we know what happens when we assume posts get taken down. This one's not even up anymore. This has been taken down since and we're hiding everything and we don't want to take the heat after we literally called them customers and then called them thieves and then welcomed them back. Anyway, Customer Service 101, this is a nightmare. I do agree that his client is the dealer, but it is not his only client. It is the customer. And if you do not have money walking into shows anymore, hold on, hold on. If you don't have any money walking into the shows anymore, you're going to have dealers even more upset than they are over some people doing some deals throughout the day. I would rather be in a room where money is moving around and we occasionally have to ask somebody, don't do this right at my table, than to be at a show with crickets and purist collectors with $50 in their pocket. Oh, for sure. That are only buying for their PC. Yeah. And I have a hunch that a couple of his buddies that are regulars there, and I could be wrong. Look, the guy's connected. I've seen some other names of people I respect in the industry know him. So maybe I'm wrong. Unless he didn't write this, then he's just off base here. But there were probably a couple of dealers that had a bad show. Somebody needs to do something about it. His ego was hurt that it wasn't what he's wanting it to be. And he's frustrated. Now, have you and I been in situations where we saw customers do things at a show and we would have been happy to see them grabbed by their belt and thrown out of the building? Absolutely. Yeah. And probably once a month, something like that happens. Yeah. So out of four shows, there's somebody where we're like, what are you doing? And when you see the repeat offender and you know that as a dealer, you can ask, but you can't stop any kind of behavior from happening. Right. At some point, the promoter's allowed to decide whatever they want. He's allowed to decide this. He's allowed to decide this. Just seems like a bad business decision. Well, I just don't think he's thinking through what's happening with the space. No. And there's a reason that this show at the Polish club in Lake Worth, is having so many people walk through. And here's what no promoter wants to acknowledge. Okay. It's happening because since breaking became mainstream and repacks became a thing, the show space is a primary source for a lot of people to source inventory, to run on their business, especially the repack space. But you have people that are getting into breaks and they're left with all this inventory. They only care about one or two hits that they got trying to recoup some of it. Right. So there's a wave of people coming in now that are not accustomed to learning about cards on the show floor. Right. That's not how they've been introduced. They're just walking in there. I don't see less demand for trade nights anywhere. I mean, if you went to the national, we talked about it. There was hardly any room in the VIP lounge. The hotels were filled up to the point where whether it was for the national or not, they're sending people away. Oh, just at ship a few weeks ago. The trade night there is always packed. I do miss trade night at the barn, Brad. I know we can't do it there, but. Maybe trade night eventually just ends up over there. That'd be cool. That would be cool. I don't think it'll happen, but it would be cool. Sounds expensive. But I mean, like you said, this kind of approach is a very short sighted. So do we want to jump into what we had next or do we want to go to. I'm not done complaining. Oh, you're not done complaining. Okay, go ahead. Lottery ticket. Explain that line to me. Well, I mean, what he's saying is. Where's the windfall of money when I set up and they don't allow people to trade with each other? Yeah. Where is it? Where's my lottery ticket? It's stupid. I don't disagree. But what he's saying is, is if you want to sell stuff to other customers, other people walking the show, you should be paying for a table. And I will say this is the same dude. I almost I don't know. I'm going to guarantee this is the same type of guy that whenever he's talking about stuff he wants to buy, it's not customers. It's collectors. But now it's customers. Sure. I promise you. I'm not disagreeing with any collectible space. Every single thing you're saying, I don't disagree with. I don't disagree with the characterizations, but I'm saying is I believe the intent here is at the end of the day, what he's saying is you're trying to come in and sell to the other customers, not just the dealers. And if you're going to sell to the other customers, you should be paying for a table like the dealers do. Can we talk about how there's people hiding in the bathroom to make a trader? Well, the fact that you feel like you have to hide in the bathroom to make a trader sale is or the fact that you're going in there to look to see if people are like either way, you look at that. It's crazy. Weird. Yeah. No, it's weird. I understand the sentiment. There could be 500 tables at this. I wouldn't go. Yeah. No, I understand the sentiment completely. I understand what you're saying. He wants to bury it. Yeah. You just called these people thieves. Here's what happened with that. No, that happened. I know he posted this thinking that every single dealer out there was going to give him his laurels and all he got in all likelihood was insanely bad feedback and backlash to the point where he had pulled it down and closed everything off. You might want to check Twitter, dog. As people who have gotten drilled on social media before, we understand that part of it too. But at the end of the day, I get the sentiment, but it's the wrong way to approach it. There's no point in fighting a battle that you can't win. The real question becomes, how do you adapt to the reality of now? I mean, let's talk about this before we talk about adapt to the reality. What is the reality? What are the things that as dealers actually do? I'm not done. I got one more. I got one more. I know you want to get onto like helpful content. I just want to read this sentence again. And this is something that we're not going to do it, but we definitely see this on a regular basis. This sentiment across the board. Okay. The inmates do not run the prison. I do. Yeah. No, that sentence is for you, bud. That sentence is all about you. That's not about the dealer. It's not about the customer security. It's not about save. Help me. There's too many people spending money with each other in my show. That's about you. That's about your ego. And for some reason, long time dealers are walking tall when they had 20 tables eight years ago, and they have 50 tables now. And they're forgetting you don't have a show if you don't have people with money in there. And I hope this happens. I really do. This is where it's like getting more personal than it should. But if you had repackers that have been walking that show and spending money and they made a deal and you just sent them away, I hope you're prepared for your best dealers to let you know if they do that show on a regular basis and they count on that as income or their lottery ticket, whatever you want to call it, that they are now taking a substantial financial hit because you are not welcoming the money in. They may have made a deal with Jimmy on his downtown at 95% and a dealer got worked up about it. But guess what? They also dropped 40 grand in the show on 50 to $200 cards at all the other tables. And if you push them away too, just be ready for even unhappier dealers. Right. Well, and actually, Majority, one of the things you said earlier about this, that's probably very true. I would be shocked, absolutely shocked if it were There's more than two or three dealers that were making a fuss about it. I would be shocked. And like you said, I can picture those dealers. I don't know them, but I know their archetype. Yeah, well, and here's the thing. People come up to you to sell cars to you and you offer them 70% and they want 95 and you get mad. That's not their fault. And if they hear that and somebody later offers them 95%. Cool, sell your car. Do the math with me here. What's the next, okay, so think through this with me. It is possible that 15-year-old Jimmy got dropped off by his parents in the morning to go walk the show and he had a $400 downtown and you offered him 290 bucks and he said, no, I think I can do better than that. And you got butthurt about it. Jimmy walked around and got 380 bucks for the card. I say, good for Jimmy. Right. But you know what nobody's thinking about? You know what this dude's not thinking about? All caps, stupid effing stealing exclamation point people. What's Jimmy doing with that 380 bucks? Yeah. Probably buying some cards. Yeah. In the card show. The cash flow in the building is all that matters. So it is short-sighted. Okay. But let's do this because what we want to talk about is what are the like things that drive us nuts as dealers at shows that actually can be, what are the cultural things within this hobby right now that do drive us crazy, that actually maybe can be improved upon if you're a promoter. Like these are the things that you should focus on finding unique and creative ways to address within the show. And then we're going to give you some of our ideas to do that. Maybe one day we'll implement them in a show of our own. Right. We'll see. So Jason, what are some of the things as far as the type of folks walking a show? Let's get at least a baseline of here's the things as dealers that we would agree are really frustrating and things that happen that make it feel like we're losing money. Because there are times where that happens. Yes. So for a show, first off, if you're just now waiting in, it's a lot harder to get tables. Oh yeah. There's wait lists. Fortunately for me, with our business, Gary had already been hitting the local scene regionally for a couple years heavily before. So I was able to be like, hey, add tables. I'm doing this show scene with you and all that. That made it a lot easier for us. But there's a lot of people that are on wait lists. Yeah. And in these smaller shows, if you're not a buddy of theirs or they don't know anything about you, or you don't have the kind of stuff that they like, you might be waiting a really long time to get there. There's a wait list. There's a process. You're spending money. If you're actually pricing your cards, like people that work, you're spending a lot of time preparing for the show. You're getting up early. You're driving. Hotel costs, gas, all that stuff. Just to be set up for the show, right? So when people come up and they fuss with us saying they should be able to demand more than anyone in the room is willing to pay, because you're the 10th table they stopped off and they're mad, my favorite thing to do is to point out the promoter and be like, would you like me to introduce you? They sell tables. And if you want to ask a hundred percent and you're frustrated, you can. That's the way to do it. Yeah. But none of them want, they do see it in their eyes. Well, I don't want to work that hard for that. Exactly. That's annoying to us. You're allowed to do it. I'm never going to stop you, but I'm not going to have a scarcity mindset over how much money am I getting or not because of that. So that's annoying. You can go ahead and hit one up too. You talked about a couple of them. Yeah. One of the things that does drive me nuts, if you're a customer walking a show, if you're a promoter and you see this happening, this is something you probably should try to figure out how to fix. When somebody comes up to our tables and they say, hey, are you buying? And we say, yeah, we'll absolutely look. We'll make you an offer. You may not like it, but we'll look. And I'm trying to buy something. And one of the other customers walks up and sees the stuff I'm looking at and goes, hey, if he doesn't buy that, I will. Or if he doesn't, can I look at that when you're done? Chill out. Yeah. Chill out. That'll immediately throw me into a space of, oh, I'm going to buy all of it. You're not going to get any shot at it. And when you try to buy my stuff, it's 100%, period. Right. Go away from my table. That drives me absolutely nuts. The other one goes with that is somebody walks up to our table and sees a card and they're like, hey, I really like that. Can I take a look at it? And they look at it and somebody else walks up to the table, looks over their shoulder and goes, and this happens a lot. Oh, hey, if you don't buy that one, I have one. Like, no. And I think that that's what that guy was trying to deal with, but he didn't do it well. It could have been happening a lot. There could have been, now here's the other thing too that you've noticed. I talk about how the repacker money has made things, has moved a lot of money around on singles. And I do think we probably sell more bricks because repacks exist because if the value is there and it's a unique player, it may not be the most liquid, but those get purchased too and put in repacks as well. But there's the, we talked about this a couple months ago, like the different tiers within the repack. And what you do have now is you can't have a bajillion repack companies and all of them succeed. There is going to be competition. Some of them are going to just have the wrong business model and run out of money, this and that. The other way that they squeeze the margin is sending people out to go source for them, but just not offering them very much. So who are they attract? Bunch of 16 to 22 year olds with ambition that know how to hustle, that can flip. And if they're good, good on them, they're probably making a good little killing on it. And they're probably okay making 10 bucks on a card if they do that a hundred times over the course of a show. But if you have a small show and maybe this is what happened, 15 teenage kids, for lack of a better word, come rolling in with their Zion cases and a couple grand, and they're only making money if they're buying dirt cheap and they're low balling everybody and then buying up from the customers. I've seen that happen where I'm like, dang, that's frustrating. But I also know that in the grand scheme of things, if you're setting up more than once a month somewhere, eventually that money comes to your table too if you're reasonably priced and you have the right stuff. Oh, for sure. I mean, in addition to those things, people that are walking a show, one of my other big pet peeves is basic etiquette at a show. Don't use my showcases as a table to transact business with anybody but me. And that happens a lot too. Kids just walk up, not just kids, adults too, and just flop their case. Don't ask, hey, can I sit this here? Just drop it on top of your showcase. One of your showcases get broken that way. Yeah, glass. And then they just start transacting business with the person standing beside them. And we have to, hey guys, do you mind moving that off to the side? I wanna make sure everybody can see the card. Like a lot of these, here's what I'm saying. Like 90% of this is solved by saying, hey guys, hey, can we have a conversation real quick? Or if you have five of them, hey, I tell you what guys, next month. I mean, if we would just change our mindset a little, if it's really about the hobby, right, and the best thing for the purest, then hey guys, next week I'm gonna give you guys two tables if you want them. I'm gonna give them for half off, we're saying hypothetically they're teenage kids, whatever. I really like the ambition that you have. I think it's really cool. I like that you guys are hustling that. These guys work really hard for it. So I'd really like for you to get a table. Would you consider doing that? Then if you see them repeatedly not doing it, then it's like, hey, you can't do that here. But to go full blast on anybody spending money, like I guarantee you there were people at this show that were doing what they've done at every other. Maybe they made one trade or somebody said, oh, did you say Ed Oliver, that's my PC. That's the great stuff that can happen at a show. Absolutely. It's almost like somebody wants to have the leverage of an LCS, but they don't want to spend the money. Well, the reality is, is that. Watch us find out this guy has a huge LCS and 20 other shows, but this is a problem. It doesn't matter. Listen, people like our stuff, at least we assume you do, because we don't care, we say what we think. I don't care if the guy has 10,000 shows, this was bad. It's the wrong attitude to have if you want to grow and to foster the future of the hobby, which I think that's part of it. What does the future of shows look like? Trade nights are not slowing down at all. The collecting base is simultaneously getting larger but younger. That's not changing. Right, that's not changing. We see for every three or four people, we see our age that are coming back into the hobby, we see 10, 12-year-olds that are just starting to really grind it out and not just try to flip $1 cards, they're working. And this is another one. When I was a kid, back in the late 80s and early 90s, the place where shows happened more than any place else was malls. And my folks had no problem taking me to shows. You know why? Because that was seven hours of free babysitting. They dropped my ass off at River Valley Mall in Lancaster, Ohio at 10 a.m. and they picked me up at 5 p.m. And I just wandered the mall looking at cards, buying and selling cards, ripping packs, taking the stuff I hit. Yeah, and I think that's happening at bigger shows now. People are dropping kids off. We'll see dads and sons together, dads and daughters together, but we'll also see just roving packs of under 16-year-old kids hustling and working, which is awesome. Yeah, so the quick question for those of you listening, is it better for the hobby that they're being dropped off or would it be better if they weren't and they had guidance and they only would get tables? We know the answer to this. Yes, we want them in the hobby. So how do we adapt shows? I guess the first question, if you're a promoter of a show, that I would be shocked if, again, back to what you said, we do a lot of smaller local shows. Right. Do you think that half of the promoters that do those shows have asked this one simple question, what's the purpose of my show? Do you think that that question has entered their mind? I think until the COVID boom, not so much. I do think there's been more thought going in because there's more competition and it's forcing it, but not like on the front end. Yeah, I'm talking about like the smaller shows. Yeah, I mean, I can think of one where I've seen like, it's okay to give some flowers here. Sure. But like Rob down at Game Time, he's taken this show in a new area in Chillicothe, and he's done shows for a long time. This particular show, I see him being very thoughtful and he's promoting his marketing, the way he communicates with dealers and all that. So I see it happening, but there is a lane of promoters for every one of those stories. There's probably another 60% of the shows that it's my prison. Yeah. Right? The purpose of the show. The inmates aren't gonna run it. The purpose of the show seems to be, how can I get paid as a promoter? And they get pissy with the dealers. That's where I don't, when that happens and they start giving the dealers attitude, like I'm not gonna drop names. There's a couple that we go to where I've told you in the last couple of months, like I would rather do less shows and go to way bigger ones the last three days and pay way more money not to deal with this. Yeah, right. You know, so. So one of the things that when we look at it. You're like, easy now, bud. I'll let y'all figure out which ones. When we look at this statement that John made about the Lake Worth Sports Card and Collectibles show, is it really about your dealers? Is this statement really about protecting your dealers? Because if it is, here's a really simple solution for you. Let's do some solutions. So first things first, if you believe that these people walking the show are taking money out of your dealers' pockets, there's a very simple solution to this. And it's so simple that if you're a promoter and you're watching this, you're either gonna go, that's brilliant, or you're gonna hate me for saying it. Because you don't really mean. Because you don't really mean it. Charge five bucks admission to your show, and then when the day is over and all that admission money is taken in, split it evenly among all your dealers. Oh my gosh. If it's really about protecting your dealers, and you have a thousand people come to your show, and it's 80 tables, you took in $5,000, that's about, what, 40 bucks a dealer? That just kind of gets passed in to each one of them. And, well, it's 50 bucks a dealer, 50 bucks a dealer. Nobody will come to the show. Guess who's gonna be promoting that show when they know that they're getting a portion of the rake. Yeah, the point is- The dealers will promote the crap out of your show. Is it about the dealers, or is it about you? Yeah, exactly. That's the real question. That's the real question. So if that's the case, there's a very simple solution to that problem. Okay, so another solution within that is, so you have this foot traffic of people that are trying to transact. Now, again, we have literally had this situation happen that this guy's talking about, and it is frustrating. You're doing a deal on my showcase, and people are rubbernecking trying to see what cards I have. And it's like, prime time, all the people are hitting the showcase, and I know that this show is big enough where once they go past, I'm probably not getting a second pass, right? So it is a thing. It is frustrating. But you better be planning for this next generation of collectors that do business like that. We don't talk about them a lot. Have you seen, and I'm gonna give him props on this, the way he promotes it, the way he markets it, the way he runs these, these trade nights that Card Collector 2 does? Oh, yeah. It's freaking awesome. Yeah. He has said, hey, there's a new wave of collectors. I'm gonna be a resource to them. I'm just gonna create a space for them to be able to trade, to hang out, to talk about the hobby, to build friendships. Buy and sell. He's not scared of losing revenue at his shop. He's giving away, I'm sure, there's partnerships and all that. We're not gonna get into all the weeds on that. But I do think it's important when it's due, like this is an example of somebody with Ryan down at that shop that is seeing this, is realizing that there's a need, capitalizing on the opportunity. Now, at the end of the day, does it hurt his bottom line that now 5,000 kids that popped into a trade night are gonna have that as their favorite LCS? No, but good for him for growing his market by giving something, an experience away. So if you really care, then maybe it's the equivalent like we have VFW Legion shows a lot. Looks like the Polish club is a similar size space. Is it time to consider a space where you have a separate trade area? Or if you don't do admission to that, if you guys wanna do a trade and you don't wanna set up tables, hey, we have a little spot here. It's 10 bucks a piece. Go nuts, just go trading in there all day long. And, well, I would say don't do it all day long. Or separate, whatever it is. I would say if your show runs from 10 to three, which is pretty standard show hours, maybe that trade area opens up from one to three and it's 10 bucks to get in there and set your stuff up, first come, first serve. but he can come in and go and buy. I just, I just believe that this happens when markets boom all the time. Oh, people get the scarcity mindset of, I need to hold on to mine. There's not enough to go around. And I understand, now, what we may find out is in this particular show, it's a major problem. Like, and if other dealers have set up there, like I know we have some mutual friends from that spot, if you guys have set up there and it's a way bigger issue, realize I have a hunch it's a lot like all the other shows out there, just with the language that was being used, the way he was talking, how condescending he was, judgmental, seeming to have a superior complex, but also wildly insecure at the same time. Just a few observations there. But there are things that can be done. Mark off space, prepare for it, because if you don't have people walking into your show, your dealers are gonna be even more frustrated than if people were walking in and spending some of their money elsewhere. So let's build, let's build a skeleton of what an ideal show looks like. A hundred table show. Okay. What's the ideal skeleton? A room that's big enough. And by big enough, you're gonna do this with me and you know how I'm wired, so I'm gonna be like trying to build a strategic plan around all this, but with a room that's big enough, it's probably bigger than big enough for a hundred tables. Yes, you wanna have enough space in between the rows that people can walk in between and that your dealers are on top of each other back to back. So that's number one. Number two, I would say, a dedicated trade area. It's just getting to that point. And it depends on how you wanna structure that, but something that gives people an opportunity, especially if you have a problem with this kind of stuff happening at your shows. Another area that you and I have talked about. Throw out a creative idea on that, hold, put a pin in there. Yes, fire away. Just came up. You could, there's ways to do it creatively too. Let's say you don't wanna charge for it, you don't wanna do it dedicated. Hey, I put four folding tables up against this wall. There are no chairs allowed, but if you guys wanna stand here and make some deals, this is the spot for that. Yeah. I just am convinced that people selling things and getting cash first thing at a card show want to spend money at your show. Yeah, yeah. They just don't wanna give away for 60 or 70%. I'm okay with that. Another one that I think is a must have at that size and larger shows and that we don't see very often. I would say a dedicated creator space. And if you're smart about it, it'll have a backdrop with your show's logo all over it. It'll be a spot for creators to go and say, hey, we're at this and this show, we're gonna walk and do some deals and it'll advertise your show on those people's channels. You will avoid some of the clogging that happens when people are trying to do that kind of content in the middle of your aisles. Yeah, you could put a couple of high top tables in a spot. Hey, let's go do this deal over here. I wanna catch it on camera. Yeah. If it doesn't, it doesn't. By the way, if you wanna know what should actually happen with the Breakers Pavilion, that's your answer. The breaking in the Breakers Pavilion is not it. People just wanna really meet and see the person that they hang out with. So create a content section, give Backyard and whoever else is doing it, their little spot, right? And it's more of just shooting content, meeting people, and then you probably get 70% of that space back and I get less of a headache. Yeah. And then last but not least for me- You're supposed to laugh at that. You're a little dialed in right now. I am dialed in. Okay, go ahead. Well, the problem is, is if I don't keep my train of thought while you're going, I'll lose it. I'm a human pattern interrupt. The other thing that I believe wholeheartedly, and if we ever do a show, which we've talked about, this'll be a big part of it, is find ways to encourage more kids to be involved. One of the things that B-Sports does at their ship shows, and I don't know if they've introduced it at Grove City, I can't imagine that they won't eventually, is they do a kid scavenger hunt. And when kids get there, they go check in, they get a list of things that they need to find, and when they come back with that whole list completed, usually it's certain dealers they have to have sign on it, and they come back and they get a prize. And those prizes are donated. And let's call a spade a spade here, guys. If you're a promoter of a show, two things I know to be factual. One, it's really hard work if you do it right. Way more work than people think it is. It's a lot more work than people think it is if you do it right. Also, you're making pretty decent money doing it if you're doing it right. Give a little back to the next generation there, and it will grow your show. You could reach out to dealers and say, if any of you have some, I'm gonna do mystery grab bags, you can throw comments, insert slacks, whatever. Some retail packs that you can get for 50 cents, like whatever. It wouldn't even have to be that expensive. Yeah, things to grow the next generation and encourage more of those parents to come with their kids and do that kind of stuff. Do a drawing for a free table that day. Yeah, like, hey, have one table where it's like, hey, somebody that's here that's, I would target like, if a kid wants to set up for a day, we do that, hey, take a ticket. If you're there in the first hour, we pull a ticket, and you get a table for the rest of the day if you brought a showcase, whatever, right? Yeah. There's ways to do it. But the point is, is adapt what you're doing to the new reality. Don't try to force your reality onto it. It's a good football analogy. The best head coaches are the ones who adapt to their players' skills. They don't try to force their players into their system. Yeah. One final thing. Anything else to add there? And then we'll move on. Okay. I hope you get exactly what you're asking for. Yep, the day you deserve. Well, I mean, if he gets all those things, he probably won't have people trying to do that. Yep, that's true. All right. The other thing. What? Promoters. Small show. This is important. Okay, fire away. It is not a bad idea to contact some people that you know are regular dealers. Even if you think they do a lot of shows, if you know that they buy, and they buy a lot throughout the day, that's a huge plus for a smaller show is to know that somebody that brings cash and advertises it, that has a little buying station, and it does, that happens for us sometimes, and there's sometimes we're the smallest fish in the room, right? Yeah. But it is something to consider when you're building your tables out. It's somebody there that actually is willing to buy, because if you have a bunch of tables where nobody's buying, and people are expecting that, where the buyers are only offering 50%, that's probably part of the reason you have people that are trying to get deals elsewhere in the show, all right? Yep. Up next, quick little pop or drop. Oh, okay. Yeah? Let's do it. All right. Do we want to refresh the rules for pop or drop so people know? Go ahead. It's not like a rule, but go for it. If you don't know how pop or drop works, this has nothing to do with what we think of the player or their future performance. It is literally, if you have their cards right now, should you sell them, which is drop, or should you hold them or be buying them? That's pop. Right. I don't have opinions on the middle two. Very simple. So I'll be open to yours. Okay. And then based off what you say, I'll either agree or disagree. So let's go first one. Travion Henderson. Travion Henderson, New England. I think he's pop. I really do. I think there's not been a ton of hype around him. I think it's been a little bit quiet compared to, now again, we're Buckeye fans, so we might have a little bit of clout. Or maybe we've just seen a little bit more. I think he's in the right system. I think he's gonna get a bajillion touches this year. And I think he's a player where you find out real quick if he's got the stuff. And I think he has the stuff, so he's a pop for me. Do you think he ends up having a better rookie year than Gente? I think they could have the same year and Gente gets all the talk. I think statistically he's gonna have a very strong year. Hobby-wise, is that team exciting enough in that division to do it? Travion, oh, you're talking about Gente or Travion? Travion. Travion's market right now, you can get pro-uni, non-numbered autos for between 100 and 150 bucks. The college uni stuff is more like 75 to 100. I personally think he's probably a drop, not because I disagree with your assessment of what he's gonna do this year, but because I think from here on in, the attention's gonna go to Gente. Because I think the Raiders, this is a hot take, but that Raiders offense is gonna be way better than people think it's gonna be. Mostly because indoor Geno is a top five quarterback in the NFL. Outdoor Geno is not. But 12 of their 17 games are indoor this year. So just kind of keep that in the back of your mind. For you a pop, he's a drop for me. All right, next. Matthew Golden. Packers wide receiver. Number one. Yep, number one pick, and he's gonna start the year as their number one because everybody else is hurt. He's a pop for me. His market is not high right now. And if you look at the last three or four seasons, every year there's at least one receiver that's a rookie. How expensive is he right now? Non-numbered, non-SP autos, 100 to 125 bucks. The numbered stuff, 150 to 200. And he's on an offense that throws the ball a lot, that has a really good quarterback. And they are fully expecting to make a run towards the Super Bowl and playoff relevance this year with that Micah Parsons trade. Well, I would say so because of the situation he's in, he's probably a pop. But he's the guy that you probably, if you're buying him, get on it. Because if he pops off in the first couple weeks, it's gonna jump and it's gonna settle when the rest of that. Yeah, but every year there's a receiver that goes off. Yeah, he'll pop. But if you have three more receivers that pop back in week six or eight, that the distribution's gonna spread out a little bit just because of the tactical advantage you would have in coaching that. Sure, but I see him being this year's Brian Thomas Jr. Oh, okay. I think that that's what happens. Last year preseason, Brian Thomas Jr. also mid to late first round pick and nobody cared. All the money was going to Marvin Harrison Jr. And then Brian Thomas Jr. went off and his market tripled. So, pop for me. All right, Abdul Carter. Also a pop. We haven't seen a defensive player with this kind of upside at that position enter the league since Micah Parsons. And you remember what Micah Parsons' market did his rookie year? It went insane. Abdul Carter, very, very similar type of player. Now, he's a little more expensive? No, he's cheap as all get out right now, cheap, cheap. Very few autos out there, but less than 100 bucks, 50, 60 bucks, and would not shock me to see a 12 plus sack year rookie year in New York. He's got a good pass rusher across from him. So, teams can't just slide everything his way and only chip him. He's going to get opportunities. He's good against the run too. So, he's not coming off the field or he's not going to be a third down guy. He's going to be a three down guy. Yeah. He's going to be working. I don't really have a strong opinion. If he's that cheap, sure, pop, why not? All right. Old school PMGs, not the new stuff. The berry pops off. What'd you say it was, over five? Over three. 372 plus buyer's premium, yeah. So, again, like we've already mentioned, the basketball end of this has been insane for a while. Most people collecting for even a year or more have seen what these cards look like and know that they can be very valuable. With what I see happening at that side of the market, I feel like there'll be more and more people trying to, like once a piece of the market raises and there's financial gain for it raising and people have the money to do that, I could see that being pushed a little further up. Yeah. I think it's a pop, but we're not saying it as if that market hasn't already been great for these cards. It's a pop for me too. Yeah. And the biggest reason is- We're not saying that it's cheap right now. No, it's not cheap. However, this is why I think it's a pop beyond the fact that money's shifting there. They're super rare and they don't sell very often. So if you're, and I'm talking mostly about the 96, 97, 98 PMGs. There was new PMGs released in 2013 in the FLIR Retro set and those are strong too. I've got a Jerry Rice green to 50, the highest graded copy of it out there. But they don't sell often, which means you're going to be able to sometimes buy them based off of an old comp or extrapolating off of that old comp, but maybe still being able to get them for way under what they could potentially go for in an open market situation. If the last sale was 2022 at 3K, the card's probably worth eight to 10 now with what that market has done. However, the seller may say, well, I think it's up more than what it was five years ago. And your question should be, well, how much more? And they may go, well, it's probably 5K now. If you think it's a 10K card and they want 5K for it. You're playing a riskier game. It's a riskier game, but with money shifting there, it's not horrifyingly risky. One thing that I would say that we don't normally say when we talk about buying and selling and flipping when the deal is right. When you start getting into the bigger stuff and probably what's that threshold that you've noticed? Like over five? Yeah. Is that where it kind of changed? Over 5K? It's not a bad idea to have a buyer in mind. Yeah. Or know where you're gonna move the card. Or do you have the platform and the metrics, right? Like if you're on eBay, do you have the right store to move that in? Or is it the right kind of card to take to a big auction house? Yeah, it may be, it may be. But just think through that on the bigger end. We never want to, what we're not trying to do is tell you this is your investment. That's not what pop or drop is. No, no, no, no, no. Where it is, you know, right now what we're seeing. So, okay, one more thing before we wrap up today. I always do a low-end liquid segment. I have a high-volume, low-end eBay store with 48,000 listings in it right now. And I go live on TikTok when I'm shipping and answer a ton of questions. Anybody want to sell that? Low-end liquid is a segment where I just go over a set, something that I've noticed has been selling a little more lately so that you can be a little sharper when you're digging through the boxes or buying a collection of the low-end stuff to sell on eBay. This one surprised me a little bit because it has not done this in years, but this year it is starting to happen a little bit more. And I think it's just a subset that some people that buy low-end cards are starting to collect a little bit more. So this is out of 2019, out of gallery. Gallery ended when? Two years ago? Yes. Two years ago? But this is the Master and Apprentice set. They, a lot of times, have some unique feature from the city behind them, and it's a way of linking an old great to a new star. This particular one's Stan Musial and Paul Goldschmidt. Obviously, this one's still in inventory. Right. But there were several that have been selling. So you have, like, there's... Fernando Tatis and Manny Machado. The checklist is kind of cool because you just have a lot of great names and if you PC a team, it's a cheap card that looks a little different. But these are selling kind of quick for me. So if you find them and you're building out a stack, they move pretty quick for me in the last couple months. So take that for what you will. I also, as I'm telling you this, I'm like, really that card? But I just went looking through my sales and there's been a lot of them with this stuff lately. So definitely check that out. Master and Apprentice is the name of that subset. You can find that in Topps Gallery. Perfect. Before we go today, we always ask this now. We used to feel bad about asking it. Now we don't feel bad about asking anymore. If you are watching this and you have not hit that subscribe button on YouTube, hit that for us. Hit that like button. It helps us out a ton in the algorithm and it's absolutely free for you. Same thing on TikTok. If you're catching a clip on TikTok, give us a follow there. We really appreciate it. Every Thursday night at 6 p.m. Eastern time, we go live on WhatNot. We run cool cards. We don't run monster cards. We just run cool fun cards. And our goal is for it to feel like about four hours of this, just hanging out with you guys. Come hang out with us on Thursday nights. Give us a follow there at The Ball Card Show, all one word on WhatNot. Anything else you have to toss into the pie this week, Jason? No, just like, don't, if you're one of the prisoners, don't, if you're a prisoner at this show, just know that you're an inmate and you're not in charge and security is involved. That's it. That's all I got. This has been The Ball Card Show, The Esports Podcast. For The Esports Collective. Bye now. Peace. ♪♪♪