How to Check a Graded Pokemon Card Before Buying

A graded card arrives in a sealed plastic holder with a printed label: the card's identity, the grading company, a grade, and a certification number. That number is the thing you can check before you pay. This guide is the check itself, and — just as importantly — what a clean result does not settle.

The check, in order

• Get the certification number from the photograph, not the description. If the label is not legible in any image, that is the first thing to ask for. A seller who will not photograph the label has answered your question.
• Go to the grading company's own lookup, typed in yourself. Use the grader named on the label — their site, reached directly. Do not use a link supplied in the listing, and do not rely on a screenshot of a result. For PSA that lookup is PSA Cert Verification. For any other grader, find their equivalent page on their own site rather than through a search result or a seller's link.
• Match the returned record to the card in the pictures, field by field — not just the grade. The table below is what to compare.
• Use the grader's own images if that grader publishes any. Whether a given company shows the card it slabbed varies, and we have not verified which do; look at what the lookup actually returns rather than assuming an image will be there.
• Ask for what is missing before bidding, not after.

What to match

Printing is where most money is lost quietly. Two cards can share a set and a collector number and still be different products — see holo vs reverse holo for how that happens and what to look for.

What a successful lookup actually establishes

It establishes that the number you typed corresponds to a record held by that grading company, and it tells you what that record says the card is. That is genuinely useful. It is also the whole of it.

What it cannot do is witness the object in front of the camera. A lookup is a database query; it has no way to know which physical holder a photograph shows. So a valid certificate number that belongs to a real graded card is consistent with the listing being exactly what it claims — and also consistent with that number having been reproduced onto something else. The lookup cannot separate those two cases, and no amount of reading the result more carefully will make it able to.

PSA says this itself, on the lookup page

This is not our inference. PSA's own cert-verification page carries a notice stating that verifying a certification number on its database does not eliminate risk, because — though it describes this as uncommon — criminals do attempt to counterfeit PSA grading inserts using real certification numbers taken from public sources. The same notice states that PSA does not view items listed on the web and does not warrant or guarantee that any such item is genuinely PSA-authenticated, and it recommends buying PSA-verified collectibles from trustworthy sources. (source: PSA Cert Verification)

Two things follow, and it is worth separating them. First, a clean lookup is necessary and not sufficient — the number matching is the floor, not the finish. Second, and this is the part people miss: the failure mode runs in the direction you would not expect. A copied number returns a real record for a real card. The result looks perfect precisely because the number is genuine. So “it checked out” is not evidence against this particular problem.

This paragraph is about PSA and only about PSA. It is PSA's published guidance on PSA's own page. We have not read an equivalent statement from any other grading company and do not extend it to one; if you are checking a slab from a different company, read that company's own guidance rather than assuming this applies.

What to ask the seller for

• A straight, in-focus photograph of the whole label, readable.
• The front and back of the slab, in even light, with no glare across the card.
• A photograph of the edges of the holder — you are looking at the holder as an object, not only at the card inside it.
• Confirmation that the photographs are of the actual item and not a stock image. Stock photography on a graded single is a reason to move on.

Before you pay

• The label is legible in a photograph you were given.
• The number resolves on the grader's own site, reached directly.
• Every field in the table above matches the card in the pictures.
• Where the grader publishes images, they match too.
• You are comparing the price against the same company at the same grade.
• You have thought about where you are buying, not only what. PSA's own guidance is to buy verified collectibles from trustworthy sources, and it names marketplaces it does not recommend. (source: PSA Cert Verification)

That last point is easy to get wrong. A grade from one company is not interchangeable with the same number from another, and our comparisons keep the company and grade together for exactly that reason — see the grading scale guide.

Where to go next

• Browse graded listings — compared against references for the same company and grade.
• Raw vs graded — whether to buy the slab at all, which is a separate question from this one.
• What listing photos can establish — the same reasoning applied to raw cards.

Nothing on this site authenticates a physical card, and neither does a certificate lookup. We check identity, availability and the comparison we publish; the object itself is between you and the seller.