PSA on Pokemon Rips Gambling and Addiction
Summary: In a detailed discussion about the Pokémon trading market, specifically focusing on eBay, onefootflipper points out that Pokémon sales recently surpassed sports cards on the platform but warns of potential market instability. They discuss the economics of selling Pokémon singles versus boxes and highlight how the singles market remains robust due to collectors' interests in the gambling aspect of opening products rather than just acquiring desired cards. onefootflipper also notes that unfulfilled transactions are reported in significant volumes, affecting sales data accuracy. Meanwhile, funfactorychannel and chapeau-noir compare Pokémon to other collectible crazes like Beanie Babies and emphasize the persisting speculative nature of these markets. They further explore other card games like Magic the Gathering and how careful trading can mitigate financial losses typically associated with collectibles.
Pokemon rips feed the same part of the brain that fuels gamblers. Ebay is full of pokemon addicts. Ive seen friends lose everything trying to get the golden pull, they never did and now they are in so much credit card debt. . Ebay promotes this proudly and pumps their live shillers up because $ is more important than mental health apparently. SO for those who need help with a pokemon addiction contact
https://gamblersanonymous.org/ Dont be embarrased. Gambling is an addiction and can be treated. Ebay can be a great place but it needs to take this more seriously to help prevent creating new addicts.
chapeau-noir
·4 months agoI recall back in the day seniors getting shoulder bursitis from playing the slots all day on these cheap casino junkets. I guess it's all just push-button now - bleh - where is the visceral joy from yanking that lever and hearing the whirrrrrr?
luckythewinner
·4 months agoHow, specifically, is eBay supposed to help prevent creating new addicts? Should they be doing more than Pokemon, Walmart and Target?
gurlcat
·4 months ago@luckythewinner I'm a W+ member and I can say with certainty that Walmart doesn't send me notifications to remind me of items I put in my wish list, let alone merely viewed.
chapeau-noir
·4 months agoFidget spinners!
chapeau-noir
·4 months agoIt's Beanie Babies all the way down.
gurlcat
·4 months ago@chapeau-noir Certainly lots of overlap, but unless I'm mistaken weren't BB's always sold individually, and you'd know which one you were buying? To me sealed packs of trading cards is more like straight up 'scratch card' lottery tickets. Also eBay has changed so much since the early days. Back then you could view some BB listings, decide not to buy them and forget you even considered it. Now you would be getting offers for those listings and being shown more listings of them every time you get on the platform, until you re-train the algorithm to show you other things.
chapeau-noir
·4 months agoPeople haven't changed, though, since the Tulip Craze - the mania for Beanie Babies as 'investments', the amount of money people poured into competing and then collecting them, the myth of the Unicorn...it's all pretty much the same. When Pokemon goes the way of Beanie Babies, it'll be something else.
grann-4629
·4 months agoAnyone interested in reviving the Pet Rock? I have about one million of them in my yard. tks
wri-8727
·4 months agoBeanie Babies? Pogs...
thelongball
·4 months agoDrunk Driving kills many people every year. I don't hold Ford responsible because they made the car.
All things in life can lead to negative results.
Its up to the individual to make the choices in life that give the best results.
Most of life's answers are right in front of us when we look in a mirror.
You can't lie to the person looking back at you in a mirror.
Ebay is not responsible for addiction. The user is.
Too much time is wasted trying to blame people for what is wrong all the time. Focus on what you can control is what can fix all ills.
selsa84
·4 months agoSeriously though, I used to do sports betting and was quite good at it. Won a lot of money but the stress of it made it not worth it. Had a good job at the time but was more focused on the games and started slacking bad.
selsa84
·4 months agoFound myself in the same predicament with Weiner dog racing.
wri-8727
·4 months ago"Ebay can be a great place but it needs to take this more seriously to help prevent creating new addicts. "
Gamestop: CURRENT CHASE CARDS
#115 KANGASKHAN-HOLO 1998 POKEMON JAPANESE PROMO | FAMILY EVENT TROPHY CARD
$69,688
https://powerpacks.gamestop.com/
Adds up...
onefootflipper
·4 months agoThings like that fuel the idiocy. You can't open anything like that in a pack. Most of those cards are over 20 years old when the print runs were much smaller and the production values were much lower, and they were opened only by children. And somehow still managed to grade a 10 anyway. Most people ripping pokemon cards will never have a card graded, if they do actually hit a $100+ card then they are about 50 times more likely to sell it to the local card shop at 60 percent of market value and buy more packs than they are to grade it or keep it.
Pokemon prices are also extremely arbitrary. Almost no one plays the underlying game so it has almost no effect on the card prices, but they don't just price by rarity either. Base set Charizard is $556 (down almost $40 from yesterday), and base set Poliwrath is $30. The exact same number of both those cards were printed. The popularity of the character from the cartoon can effect the value of equally rare cards by up to 20x the value.
Also, going back to that link above. Those prices are 100 percent wrong, they are taking into account the huge number of higher end pokemon cards sold at auction on ebay that are bid up to small fortunes, not paid for, and then relisted. They list a PSA 9 Charizard 1st edition as $56,000. When in reality multiple PSA 10 versions of that card have sold for under $6000 on ebay in the past 3 months.
The really valuable cards are also not that liquid. The pool of people willing to pay for them is very small.
The whole market is about 2 years overdue for a crash anyway. The number of people "investing" in sealed boxes is much higher than you could ever imagine. About 8 years ago it started to become common knowledge that unopened Pokemon and Magic the Gathering boxes greatly increased in value over time. However back then no one had seriously been buying them as long term holds, old unopened boxes were just more accident and oddity than anything else. But when the word got out thousands of people started buying a box or a case of every single set as an investment. There is however no demand for these boxes outside of investment purposes and big social media people who will make enough money from a video that they can open a $2000 box that only has $80 worth of cards inside it. This market is bound to crash eventually and when it does it will take the rest of the Pokemon market with it.
wri-8727
·4 months agoBoys will be boys
On a global market, like say eBay, onefootflipper, how many pokemon cards change hands per day and do you think maybe GameStop's interest in eBay includes expanding this platform into one gigantic craps game?
onefootflipper
·4 months agoThe crazy market is actually new boxes not actual cards, or anything with a gambling aspect to it. Things with known contents (like prebuilt starter decks) never sold very well. The actual Pokemon singles market is ludicrously small in relationship to size of the new product market.
When I worked at card retail our front counter guys were kept extremely busy with the constant flow of people buying and selling single Magic and Yugioh cards. It was literally the biggest part of the whole business at the time. $100+ cards would sell out of the case on a daily basis.
Meanwhile they rarely ever even had to go over to the counter that held Pokemon singles as the Pokemon customers consisted almost entirely of people buying new products and people selling cards back to the store. The overwhelming majority of Pokemon singles we got from purchases just got sold out in bulk to the bulk purchasers where they likely ended up in mystery boxes, repacks and "instant collections". The high dollar ones always went on ebay because we inevitably already had one in the case that was unsold. No reason to put another 1st edition Charizard in the case when you have already had one in there for as long as you can remember.
The Pokemon market in Japan has apparently already crashed, the American one cannot be that far behind. What usually seems to trigger it is sets that don't have enough focus on the original popular characters from 1999. You see there are over 1000 different Pokemon characters, but the fans largely only care about the original 151 characters from the first video game, and within those the sub-focus is on the ones that got the most screen time in the cartoons.
Of course, they have a huge US printing facility opening up next year, that will likely allow them to get back to printing to demand the way they want to which will crash the secondary market, but the Pokemon secondary market means nothing the the Pokemon company. They don't need it to remain healthy as their customers have always been 90 percent children.
roccotacodad54
·4 months ago"Ebay can be a great place but it needs to take this more seriously to help prevent creating new addicts. "
Personal responsibility is the cure not some sort of prevention by eBay. Addicts will be addicts. Both prohibition (alcohol) and the war on other substances were/are failures.
All one can hope to do is warn people, which you just did...........................
gurlcat
·4 months ago@roccotacodad54 I don't think they were suggesting prohibiting Pokemon card sales on eBay.
roccotacodad54
·4 months agoOP--->""Ebay can be a great place but it needs to take this more seriously to help prevent creating new addicts. ""
ME--->"Personal responsibility is the cure not some sort of prevention by eBay."
I was just trying to use prohibition as an example that prevention only works on a personal level. When forced it never seems to work. Guess I wasn't too clear on that...tired...Gnite...........
gurlcat
·4 months ago@roccotacodad54 What do you think about bars and casinos having rules against over-serving? Do you think all drugs including heroin, meth, crack and opioid pills should be legal and sellable without a prescription, in limitless quantities?
roccotacodad54
·4 months ago@gurlcat "What do you think about bars and casinos having rules against over-serving?"
I think the laws concerning that seem to lean towards blaming the bar instead of the person who drank too much. Again, personal responsibility.
"Do you think all drugs including heroin, meth, crack and opioid pills should be legal and sellable without a prescription, in limitless quantities? "
Well we have had a war on drugs for years and those drugs are everywhere and apparently in limitless quantities regardless of legality. Personal responsibly needed once more. Feeding, housing and all around catering to these addicts only makes it worse. Stop providing narcan (multiple times), housing, food etc. to addicts and making them responsible for their decisions. I know an EMT that hates narcan. He told me one addict has been "saved" over a dozen times and he feels that if that person is so irresponsible as to overdose that many times maybe his time would be better spent helping someone else that isn't on a course to self destruction. I agree with him..................
keziak
·4 months agoI read a book by an EMT driver who went from hating addicts to being deeply concerned about them after finding out their stories, often a trajectory from pain pills to heroin to the streets.
This discussion is interesting to me because the local Facebook Marketplace is crammed full of ads for cards , comic books and DVDs. Pretty much a clue as to their actual value.
grann-4629
·4 months agoI agree with him ...
So do I. We have doctors here who will refuse to see a patient if that patient is not active in their own treatment, for example patients who are really trying to quit smoking but just have to have one more.
grann-4629
·4 months agoAbsolutely not ... some of them are killers. OTOH, classifying Cannabis in any hazardous classification system is just stupid, especially when the person who put it there probably has a hoot every night before going to bed 😎
Can a barkeep be charged if a customer drinks too much and causes a vehicular homicide in the US?
toomuchstuffagain35
·4 months agoThe answer to that is yes, they can.
chapeau-noir
·4 months agoA customer displaying drunken behaviour will get 86'd pretty quickly - no one wants that liability of over-serving. Once in England I actually saw someone go airborne being tossed out of a side door by two exasperated members of security.
roccotacodad54
·4 months ago"Can a barkeep be charged if a customer drinks too much and causes a vehicular homicide in the US?"
---"The answer to that is yes, they can."
I think that may depend on the jurisdiction. I used to live in Nevada which is a "Personal responsibility" state and unless they changed the law you are expected to take responsibility for drinking too much, not the bar or bartender. I don't think you can sue them or hold them responsible.
There were some different laws there. If a car runs into an unoccupied car in a private parking lot the police won't come for instance.
There may be other states with similar laws?
kibble-net
·4 months agoPersonal responsibility is fantastic. I highly recommend it. You'll see me use these words on a lot on this forum.
But when dealing with addiction, often things are a bit more complicated than that. Not everyone can bootstrap their way out of a bad habit as easily as you might be able to, whether it is gambling, drinking, smoking, or just about anything else.
soh.maryl
·4 months agoYes, most of us probably understand that it's not easy to "bootstrap their way out of a bad habit".
But it's hard to understand why eBay would be required to be part of the recovery program.
gurlcat
·4 months agoWho said anything about eBay being required to do anything?
From the OP: "it needs to take this more seriously". They weren't talking about laws being put on eBay. Ironically, they were talking about eBay taking personal responsibility.
gurlcat
·4 months agoThe lingering side-effect of my (rather brief) coin obsession was how much it got me interested in history, not just American but whole-world, because I got into foreign coins too (one of the local coin shops has huge bins of foreign coins you can buy by the pound!). It's really a limitless learning opportunity for the curious mind.
But I also let the 'treasure-seeking' part of it get me, to the point of acting like a literal crackhead sometimes. -I'm talking about prowling under fast food windows late at night, for the dropped change. The crazy thing is, the odds of a coin having anything remotely special about it is ..... very low, maybe one out of a hundred or more, so what would be the point of finding a few on the ground? Well, that was the wildest thing -for some reason that was exactly how I found several cool coins! The very first one was a 1919 wheat penny on the floor at the laundromat -where I was doing laundry on New Year's Eve (I know, sad) just before ringing in 2019, so that coin was exactly 100 years old that night. Weird things like that happened often enough to keep my otherwise scientific brain suspended in a weird luck-believing spell. Like a gambler. My kid, other familly members, coworkers and friends sure did get sick of the coin subject. 🤣
chapeau-noir
·4 months agoI used to check the coin-return slots in any vending machine I passed.
When the economy was good, I'd find coins in them. When the economy was bad, they would be empty.
funfactorychannel
·4 months agoyou could have bought some 90s trading card boxes for 30 dollars and open it.. doesnt have to be pokemon. ;D
onefootflipper
·4 months agoIf you go to Magic the Gathering prerelease events and buy a box of Magic at one of those, and immediately list the cards for sale that same night then you will actually break even on average instead of having an 80 percent loss.
Of course you could also funnel that money into random stocks and in the long run you would come out ahead.
funfactorychannel
·4 months agodidnt work for me on stocks 😄 not enough mental peace.. I bought 1994 impel star trek cards for 14 a booster box and open it myself was much more fun..
mamacassidy
·4 months agoPeople facing addictions need to take personal responsibility and seek out the appropriate resources to help them, and the link you posted is a good place to start.
However, Ebay is a business platform that sells products for profit. Ebay is not a healthcare website or mental health provider. Expecting ebay to "take this more seriously to help prevent creating new addicts" is completely outside of their scope.
Their marketing is designed to get people to buy stuff, but that's no different than the marketing that all businesses do. I mean, one could argue that Amazon Prime creates shopaholics and that food delivery apps are creating over-eaters. But, like ebay, they are in the sales business, not the mental health/ addiction treatment business.
gurlcat
·4 months agoWhat your friend needs is to get into the coin error searching hobby -same itch scratched, at no true cost whatsoever. I had SO much fun with it for a couple years before I burned out. And I made some money off it too. The best part is, you risk no money whatsoever. When you "buy" a $10 roll of quarters, you have ten dollars worth of quarters!
I'd highly advise you to do some video-watching and group-lurking before diving in, so you don't accidentally dismiss a coin that actually has something. But before long you'll have a head full of things to look for. Plan your coin-getting strategy carefully, especially if you live in a small town. The last thing you want is to have no banks who'll let you get rolls.
chapeau-noir
·4 months agoI should tell him about it - he's retired and is always looking for opportunities for various incidental things. He cured his Lotto addiction when he realised it was just eating money - he's good at introspection. I think a couple of his friends leaned on him, as well. The coins have a lot more mind-fu and he would like that.
The only time I regretted not placing a bet was on the Holyfield v Tyson I fight - Evander was a real underdog, but I was a big Holyfield fan and felt he had the stuff, despite being a bulked up cruiserweight. I was going to go to the betting shop and place $2000 on the fight, which is what I could gather up at the moment. My then-spouse dissuaded me. You should have seen my face when Holyfield KO'd Tyson 😵 Even the DH was apologising. Dang - that was a LONG time ago!
soh.maryl
·4 months agoInteresting that Pokemon cards can be an addiction.
However, hope someone was joking about eBay taking this more seriously to prevent the creation of new addicts. That would be one of the more ridiculous ideas have ever heard. Would eBay create an organization called Pokemon.Anonymous?
chapeau-noir
·4 months agoI think the OP's problem was feeling that eBay was promoting the gambling aspect, not the cards.
ETA: A friend of mine developed an addiction to Lotto. People all over my region play Lotto - I can tell because they camp out at the customer service area in the supermarkets playing Lotto and snarling up traffic. I suspect more than a few have problems with it.
soh.maryl
·4 months agoAnd has anyone asked your supermarket to do something to help addicts control their Lotto addiction?
chapeau-noir
·4 months agoI have no idea, though I expect that the customer would have to display some pretty extreme behavior, whatever that would be (hanging around for hours buying tickets? Bartering their shirt for more Lotto? Climbing over the CS counter to try to get at the tickets?) A lot of people play Lotto innocently like people play the slots, with an allocated sum of money.
lacemaker3
·4 months agoNeither eBay nor politicians can save somebody from themselves. Nobody can.
Only they can save themselves.
kibble-net
·4 months agoMaybe so, but politicians sure do have a penchant for taking bribes from companies to allow them to prey on children and those who are prone to addiction.
luckythewinner
·4 months agoit was okay because I was collecting something of value
Artificial demand for something with artificial value created by artificial scarcity.
glorybells
·4 months agoBeanie Babies!
onefootflipper
·4 months agoThe funny thing is that the demand is ONLY for the unopened product. The demand is for the lottery ticket, not for the prizes the ticket can win.
Retailers can't keep sealed Pokemon product on the shelf, yet every card store in the country is loaded with the actual cards, zero shortage.
The cards themselves don't tend to go up in value much anymore, in fact they often drop for in value for long periods of time. Example, the set "Journey Together" came out March 2025, it has 11 whole cards valued at over $10 (almost all of which can only show up in card slots that show up less than 1 pack in 30, those same slots can also hold worthless cards or $2 cards when those slots do show up in a pack). 10 of those have lost value since last june, only 1 gained value.
The cards themselves are toxic assets. If you open the packs to get them then you lose. If you buy single cards of value and hold them, you also lose. Even the gold standard "Investment Grade" base set Charizard is the same price today than it was 5 years ago. Had it even kept pace with inflation it would have gone from $591 to $736 in that time frame. That same money in an S&P 500 index fund would have gone from $591 to $1136.
tobaccocardyahoo
·4 months agoSky Masterson: On the day when I left home to make my way in the world, my daddy took me to one side. "Son," my daddy says to me, "I am sorry I am not able to bankroll you to a very large start, but not having the necessary lettuce to get you rolling, instead I am going to stake you to some very valuable advice. One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand new deck of cards (Sky snaps fingers) on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But son, you do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you're going to wind up with an ear full of cider."
onefootflipper
·4 months agoPokemon is also the absolute worst gambling odds around.
If you get the packs by the booster box at normal price and don't pay taxes on them then the expect return on your investment from most boxes is around 30 percent.
Of course that return isn't in cash, it is in Pokemon cards that you aren't going to be able to sell without taking at least a 15 percent hit (online fees and supplies).
Of course the crossover between people with a retail sales tax license (to not pay taxes on their purchase) and those dumb enough to rip pokemon packs for money is almost non existent. So the real result is this.
That $130 box costs you $143. The average return on that is $39 in cards. Sell those and you get $33.15. Losing an average of $109.85 per box.
If you are buying them any other way than by the box then the numbers get much worse. That $6 pack from target costs you $6.60, it will yield $1.30 worth of cards that can be sold for $1.10 online. 84 percent average loss.
And in all cases nearly all the value in a Pokemon set belongs to the cards that only show up in the rarest slots (less than 1 card slot per booster box). So while the average box might net you $33.15 worth of sellable cards, most boxes will net under $10, with most packs netting zero.
my-cottage-books-and-antiques
·4 months ago@onefootflipper
If memory serves, ebay recently said that Pokemon sales eclipsed sports cards sales on the platform for the first time...but I don't follow this closely, so could be wrong about that. ebay has obviously put a lot into Pokemon, particularly the Lives, so if the bottom drops out of the market, it will likely have an impact. However, ebay, as a platform, will probably be better positioned to pivot to whatever the next new shiny thing is, while at least some pokemon sellers will be left holding the proverbial bag (or box, in this case).
onefootflipper
·4 months agoMost of the ebay Pokemon market is the singles market. There isn't really enough margin on "buy everything at target everyday and resell it" to absorb both the sales tax those chumps are paying, ebay fees, and the free shipping that is standard in the market for the boxes. Those guys mostly sell in person, facebook marketplace and other off the books method.
The singles market itself has never been a real issue with Pokemon. Almost everyone who has a "Pokemon problem" almost exclusively sticks to opening product, never actually purchasing the cards they actually want, because what they actually want is the gambling aspect.
Also, depending on how ebay is reporting they might be counting the monthly millions of dollars in Pokemon sales that are never paid. That happens in sports cards but not even close to the same level it happens in Pokemon where you will sometimes see the same seller sell the same card a half dozen times before it ever sticks.