Negotiation and How to Get Leverage in Sports Cards

 Most card collectors think negotiation is just haggling: subtract from the sticker price, meet in the middle, done. It's not. 

In this episode, Matt breaks down the actual framework behind why deals happen and why they don't using Chris Voss's tactical empathy principles applied directly to the card market. 

You'll hear both sides of a real card show weekend: a buy that closed at his number and eight cards that didn't sell and why both outcomes were exactly right. 

Leverage is the only variable that matters. Your job is to understand whether you have it. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:12

I was at the card show this past weekend, not really in the mood to buy anything, just walking the floor. But I had a list. It was a mental list. 90s top scrum refractors and one player that I'm underweight on heading into the World Cup. But all in all, I had no pressure. If something caught my eye, great. If not, I'm just a guy walking around looking at cardboard, talking to some friends at the tables in my own stomping grounds. That framing matters because by the end of the day, I had made a deal I was happy with on the buy side. And on the sell side, not a single one of eight cards I had out at a friend's table that weekend sold. But yet both of these outcomes were correct. That's what I want to talk about today. Not the card specifically, but the structure underneath the transaction. Why some deals happen and why others don't. And why the person who wins a negotiation isn't the one who wants the card less, it's the one who understands leverage better. Welcome back to Slabnomics. This is where we help card enthusiasts make better financial decisions. And this show exists because the card market deserves better analysis than hot takes. Today's episode is about negotiation, but not the way it usually gets talked about. I'm not going to tell you to go lowball everything, to hold your ground at 80%, and to walk away fast. I'm not going to give you a script for talking down a dealer. What I want to do is give you the actual framework for why negotiations succeed or fail. I want to give you the psychology behind it, the market dynamics that give you leverage or take it away. And a real story from a real show floor, both sides of the table that illustrates all of it for you. Most card enthusiasts walk into a negotiation with the wrong map. They think negotiation is arithmetic. You subtract from the sticker price, they come up a little, you meet somewhere in the middle. You shake hands. But that's not negotiation, guys. That's haggling. And there's a real key difference here. Haggling assumes the only variable is price. And it's what the vendor actually expects you to do. Negotiation, though, that assumes there are variables that you haven't identified quite yet. Chris Voss built a career on that distinction. The former FBI lead hostage negotiator, he made a living on turning the tables on the concept of splitting the difference. His core thesis, when applied to any high-stakes transaction, is that the person who wins is the one who understands what the other side actually wants. Not what they're asking for, what they actually want. See, in a hostage situation, that gap can be enormous. In a card show, it's usually a little bit smaller, but it's still there. And most people aren't looking for it. Tell me if you've ever done this classic bad move. Walking up to a dealer saying, I saw this card cheaper on eBay, last comp was actually X. Now you think you're anchoring with data, but what you've actually done is told them that you're not that serious about buying that card for them. You've told them that you don't understand that an eBay listing doesn't verify the provenance sitting in front of you. And honestly, you've insulted their judgment a little bit before the conversation even got started. Here's another classic bad move you might be familiar with splitting the difference. It feels like fairness. Both sides sacrifice a little, everyone moves on. But what you've actually done is you've solved for the math while you've ignored the person. It's kind of like playing poker where you only play the cards that you have, not the other men at the table. Voss calls this one the niceness ruse. See, you're being polite, but polite is not the same as smart. And in a market where sellers view their inventory not as product but as treasure, compromise for its own sake leaves value on the table every time. So what does work? The foundation that Voss goes with is called tactical empathy. And I want to be precise about this term because it sounds softer than it really is. Tactical empathy is not about being nice, it's about mapping the other person's actual position, their constraints, their emotional state, their hidden requirements. You can use empathy as an investigative tool. You're not agreeing with someone, you're seeking to understand them. And that's a significant difference. The first technique that operationalizes this is called an accusation audit. Say you walk up to a table. Before you ask for a price, you could name the worst things they might be thinking about you when you come up there. For instance, you probably think I'm here to lowball you. That's a perfect example of an accusation audit. And I'll bet you probably haven't heard that one at a table at a card show. When you say it out loud, you say it before they can even think it. And what you've done neurologically is that you've diffused the threat response. The amygdala starts warming up, but you've short circuited it. You've taken away the ammunition by owning it first. And I'll tell you, it feels really uncomfortable for a while, but it works consistently. A second technique from Voss is something he calls a calibrated question. Now, I'm sure you've heard the wisdom that you should have open-ended questions always, right? You shouldn't be asking questions that have a yes or no, but something that's a calibrated question is even more advanced. Specifically, you replace why with what and how. Instead of saying something like, why is this priced like this? Because this creates defensiveness, you say, what is it about this specific card that puts you at this number? See, this opens a conversation. Whereas when you use why, it kind of reminds people of when they were in trouble as a kid. It seriously brings us back to that. Now, later on in the negotiation, the question, how am I supposed to get there, is a nice calibrated question that can work even better. What that actually does psychologically is it invites them to solve your problem. People love telling other people how to solve problems. It makes them feel authoritative, it gives them the illusion of control, and that illusion is valuable. Plus, it puts you both on the same side. Now, the goal of these two things is just to get to one phrase. That's right. Not your right. Those are very different things. Your right is actually just a dismissal. If anyone ever says that to you, they just don't want you to talk anymore. But that's right means that the other person feels completely understood. It's a real breakthrough moment. And once you get there, you know that you've had common ground and your deal is right around the corner. Now, let's get specific to our world. Let's get to some espionage type stuff though. Voss talks about something called black swans. These are hidden pieces of information that once revealed, change the entire leverage structure of a negotiation. He says in almost every single transaction, there are three to five of them waiting to be uncovered. In the card market, the most important black swan isn't emotional, it's structural. And I'm sure it's something that you yourself know a lot about. It's supply. When PSA graded 700,000 cards a year, a PSA 10 meant something categorically different than it does today. In 2025, they're processing somewhere around 20 million cards annually, though. They've created more PSA 10s in the last five years than existed in the previous 28 years combined. Most sellers don't know this with precision. But when you're standing at a table looking at PSA 10 they're presenting as scarce, and you happen to know there are 12,000 of that card in a grade sitting in collections right now, you have yourself a black swan. The scarcity is theoretical. The supply, that's real. Now, you probably shouldn't weaponize this. That's not the move. You don't want to insult the card or challenge the person's pricing aggressively. But what you could do is you could go back to our calibrated questions and you can ask it in a harmless manner. What's the pop looking like on this one? Calm. Curious. You're projecting stability, right? And you let them reckon with the answer. Because right after that, you fall silent. Now, there's two things that can really happen. If they don't know what the pop is, you've just revealed something. If they do know, then you've made the conversation honest. And either way, you've leveled the playing field and introduced a real data point into the conversation that is usually running on emotion. Now, that's the slabnomics version of a black swan. Supply structure is leverage. Pop reports are intelligence. If you follow my content, for instance, you know that gem rates tell you whether a PSA 9 is a value or it's a failure certificate. This isn't abstract, guys. I use this framework every single time I'm standing at a table. Now, we've talked about a lot of different concepts and we've talked about hostage negotiations and FBI interrogations, but let's bring it to cards. So let me tell you something that actually happened this past weekend. I was working my way around the floor of the Austin card show with absolutely no pressure. That matters, because no pressure is an unassailable position. When you genuinely don't need to buy anything, you negotiate differently than when you do. I came to a table near the end of my walkabout with a scattered mix of cardboard, mostly Pokemon and baseball, but a few soccer cards were tucked in there. Definitely not a soccer dealer. Now, I've talked about this before, but when there's only a few soccer cards in a case, it usually means the vendor isn't really deep in the no for that market. And that's pretty consistent across most sports, or even if they're trying to dabble in TCG a little bit. In this case, seems that the person wanted a little bit of exposure to the World Cup narrative. Figures the tailwind is coming, but haven't really been living in the data. Now, I also happen to know where soccer dealers, even experienced ones, are emotionally right now. A lot of the guys have expected a little bit more movement. The World Cup thesis has been out there for a while, and most of them were positioning pretty early. Most cards haven't really gone vertical yet. There's been some appreciation, but it's been measured. And that creates a specific emotional state in sellers. They had expectations which weren't really reached, and a lot of times that makes us get impatient. For the guys who don't really follow soccer, it's even more acute. They put real money into the narrative, and the narrative hasn't paid out the way they imagined. That's a negotiating environment because their conviction was shallow to start. So back to this specific vendor. I spotted a Vinny Jr. Colorblast in a PSA 10. Looked up the comps, last public sale was recent at$450. Now I don't have a lot of Vinny exposure, and I want some case hits in that price range heading into the World Cup window. So it was really the only soccer card I saw in the entire room that I had interest in. I asked the kid at the table if there was room on the price at all. He said not much. He was into it for a pretty high price himself. There was something in the way he said it though, some emotion that I was waiting for. Disappointment. So I came in and I offered$400 on that$450 sticker price. He came back with$425 pretty quickly. Now, at$425 off that, a lot of people are gonna just go ahead and shake the hand. You got a discount, you move on, and there's nothing wrong with that. But I wasn't done gathering information. The card hadn't moved me emotionally. My number was 400, and I was willing to walk away on that. So I said it to him directly. Listen, 400 is where I want to be. If you can't do it, no worries. I was gonna head out right after this, anyways. Then his dad walked over, he heard the situation, and so I keyed in on his face a little bit as he jumped in, and he said immediately, hey, we can do 420. He seemed a little bit tired as he said it, like he kind of threw it out there with his breath. And again, at this point, most people are just gonna take the discount and feel good about the negotiation and move on. I held though, not aggressively, I didn't give him any attitude, I was just steady. And I said, listen, man, 400 is my number. If it doesn't work, completely understand. That's just where I want to be to do the deal. They did 400. Now, this isn't some crazy story, right? Like, wow, I really fleeced someone, got my price down$25. No, the important thing here is practicing the reading of the emotion, practicing to see where the vendor is when you're going through this exercise. Because if that person was more emotionally invested in the card, he would have stayed a lot more firm, and we probably wouldn't have ended up doing a deal at all. And that would have been okay. In this case, though, they weren't trying to protect the card. They were trying to leave the card. They were trying to close the transaction. So that's a market context. Simple pattern recognition and reading faces. Now, on the other side of the floor, my friend Marcos had a table for the first time. He generously offered to put some of my cards in his case. He was full Pokemon. Now, I had a few things that I was willing to let go, so I left some of my cards with him, priced them about 20% over the market, and then had a floor that I told him about 5% over market. Sent him a text with all the numbers. And I told Marcos, hey, these are the bottom prices for each card. If the guys don't want to meet me here after a little back and forth, that's completely fine. Don't worry about it. They can just move on. So I wasn't in a hurry, just left them there to see what would happen, and I walked the room. Not a single one of these cards moved. And Marcos told me that there were three or four moments where five bucks, maybe ten bucks, probably would have closed the deal. And some of those cards were$2,000 cards. But the thing is, I don't regret it. Because with these cards, time is working for me. The World Cup window is opening, and the other cards that I had with them were Pokemon cards in BGS 10 Pristine that were very popular Pokemon cards. So the sell channel that I'm targeting isn't just that specific moment at a card show table. It's a more structured process in the next few weeks where it can optimize my selling outcome. Dropping$10 to close a deal at a card show without the right buyer on the wrong timeline is just not good business. So those cards stayed with Marcos. He kept his table looking full. Some of my cards gave his setup more prospective buyers to come check out his Pokemon cards since he had some more sports banks in. But if you think about it, the deeper point here is that my cards at his table were very much like those soccer cards at the table I bought that color blast. I was a seller with no urgency though. I viewed time as a positive in my holdings. While on the flip side, that vendor who sold to me saw passing time as reinforcement that it had been wrong for him to buy these soccer cards in the first place. That's not a small thing, that mindset. And that's the most important variable in the sell side negotiation. The seller who needs to sell negotiates from weakness, always. And the seller who can afford to wait and knows where else the asset can go negotiates from a position of structural strength. The price difference between those two postures across so many transactions is enormous. So we've talked about a lot of things, but what's the actual framework that I'm getting at here? Let's bring this together. Leverage is the only variable that truly matters in a negotiation. Everything else, the tactics, the tone, the calibrated questions, the accusation audit, non-round final offers, all of these are just things that maximize the leverage that you have or gain leverage to your favor. Sometimes they even help you identify leverage you didn't know you had. On the buy side, though, leverage comes from four places. First, supply knowledge. If you understand population reports, gem rates, parallel counts, and submission volume better than the person across the table, you have a real informational advantage. And that advantage is convertible into price. Second thing is emotional reading. Most sellers have a relationship with their inventory. Some have enormous attachment to certain cards, some have almost none. The vendor with a few soccer cards in a mixed case is not the same seller as the guy who built his entire collection around a specific player. Reading which type you're dealing with shapes everything about how you approach this conversation. Third thing, genuine indifference. This one is pretty hard to manufacture, but you have to actually not need that card. The best version of this is building a defined target price before you even walk up to the table. When you have a number and you mean it, that comes through. It's not a bluff, it's a real position. The fourth thing here on the buy side is time. If you're the buyer and you can wait, you're in a stronger position than someone who has to decide today. Card shows operate on urgency a lot. End of the day, end of the weekend, don't want to bring as much inventory back. And a seller who's been on their feet all day and needs to move inventory is not the same position as a buyer who can come back next month to the same card show. Now on the sell side, leverage is simpler. It collapses almost entirely into one question. Do you need to sell? If yes, everyone who walks up to your table has some leverage on you. If not, you're just pricing things. You're setting a number that reflects where you think the asset goes from here. And if someone meets it, great. If not, you bought your asset for a specific reason, right? So as long as that reason still holds, nothing's changed after that card show if you still have the card. The mistake that I see constantly in this hobby is treating every sell side negotiation like it needs to close. It really doesn't. The urgency is often manufactured by the seller's own psychology. Psychological factors like the sunk cost of buying, or the discomfort of seeing a position that hasn't moved, or the identity trap of being publicly in on a player. But none of these are reasons to drop money at a card show. Here's what I want you guys to take from this episode. The negotiation framework that works for Chris Voss in high-stakes situations and what we do here is not about being aggressive. It's not about being clever. It's about being more informed and more honest about your own position than the person that you're negotiating with. Let's make this practical together today. The next time you go to buy a card, whether it's online or at a card show, I want you to ask yourself, does this person want to sell this card more than I want to buy this card? Then, before negotiating, know your supply, know the price you want to buy this card at, know whether time is working for or against you. Then your mission is to find the emotion that the person has in that card. This might surprise you, but asking the right questions can build a relationship with that person fast. And even if you find they're higher on that card than where you might want to be, you'd be surprised how often that person might come back to you within days and actually meet you at your price. Getting that$400 Vinny case hit happened because I meant it when I said I was fine walking away. And those unsold cards at Marcos' table are going to be fine because the window I'm targeting isn't just a card show in an April weekend. So leverage isn't a trick, it's a condition. Your job is to understand whether you have it. And if you don't, to either create it or wait until you do. If this episode landed for you, share it with one person in the hobby who needs a more systematic way of thinking about transactions. And if you got a card show negotiation story, good or bad, I genuinely love to hear it. Keep building, and I will talk to you later.