The Business of Cracking Pokemon & Sports Card Slabs — Ep. 25

Mar 9, 2026

55:43

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Sports cards and Pokemon cards have become a real side hustle and small business opportunity. From flipping graded cards to cracking slabs and resubmitting for profit, there is serious money in the trading card market. In this episode, Ben and Jon break down whether cracking a graded Pokemon or sports card is a legitimate business model or just calculated gambling. The framework is simple. Buy a graded card at the right price. Improve the condition. Resubmit for a higher grade. Capture the spread. When the gap between grades is wide enough, the math starts to work.

Watching a creator restoring a Pokemon card using professional tools, then zoom out to the real operator question: is there a repeatable system here? They discuss sports cards, Pokemon cards, grading spreads, the growing restoration kit industry, and whether slab cracking can actually scale beyond a hobby.

Then it gets bigger than cards. Ben tells the story of two Michael Jordan rookie cards almost thrown in a dumpster, a Pokemon drop at Costco, and what happened when he tried to teach his 11-year-old the difference between ripping packs and building a business.

They close on a bigger theme: how to train your brain to spot opportunity early and whether more entrepreneurs should be teaching kids how to think like operators before the world teaches them to think like consumers.

Business is simple. People are lazy.

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Timestamps:

00:16 — Cracking slabs: what it is and why collectors do it

02:25 — Pokemon crack and clean process

06:10 — Business model of cleaning, fixing and restoring cards

11:53 — Price differences between card grades

16:50 — Two Michael Jordan rookies found

22:10 — Other collectibles to 'crack and clean'

27:17 — Pokemon flip at Costco