How to value a graded ticket stub using population and sales data

On 22 January 2006 Kobe Bryant scored 81 points against the Toronto Raptors. Full tickets from that game have sold, through the auction houses we track, for $600 and for $23,180. Both were full tickets. Both were graded by PSA. The $600 example was a PSA 3 and the $23,180 example was also a PSA 3.

That is not a pricing anomaly, and it is not a story about condition. It is what happens when three other variables move while the grade stays still. Anyone valuing a graded ticket by grade alone will be wrong by an order of magnitude on a regular basis. This is the method that gets it right, and the search that answers each step.

The four inputs that set the price

A graded ticket's value is a function of four things, in roughly descending order of how much they move the number:

Grade sits inside the second of those, not above them. It matters, but it matters as a position on a population ladder rather than as a number in its own right. A PSA 5 out of ten known examples is a different asset from a PSA 5 out of two hundred.

Every lookup is a link

Each search on this site is a plain web address, so a specific question has a specific link that answers it. You do not have to search and then filter; you can go straight to the answer, and you can send that answer to someone else.

Those six patterns cover most valuation work. The rest of this article walks the Kobe ticket through them in order.

Step one, identify the exact ticket

This is the step people skip, and it is the one that produced the $600-to-$23,180 spread. PSA does not catalogue "the ticket from the 81-point game". It catalogues two separate full-ticket varieties from that game, under different set identifiers, each with its own population count.

The box office variety is twenty times scarcer, and its best sale beats the standard variety's best sale despite the standard variety having sold far more often. A valuation that treats the two as one ticket is not slightly wrong, it is answering a different question. Search the population report first and confirm which row you are actually holding before you look at a single price.

Step two, read the population at your grade

Once the variety is fixed, the population report tells you where your grade sits in the surviving field. For the standard 81-point full ticket, PSA had graded 202 examples as of the 8 July 2026 capture, and the distribution is heavily weighted to the low end.

Two numbers matter more than the rest. One example has reached PSA 10, and 23 have reached PSA 7 or better, which is 11% of the graded field. Everything from PSA 2 to PSA 5 sits in a crowd of 116 tickets, more than half the population. That shape is normal for tickets that were torn and pocketed on the night, and it is why the price ladder in the next step is flat at the bottom and steep at the top.

Step three, find what comparable examples sold for

Now the sales. Below is every recorded sale of an unsigned standard-variety 81-point full ticket that we can tie to a specific certification number, twenty in total, spanning May 2020 to January 2026. Signed examples are excluded here deliberately, for reasons the next step makes obvious.

Read down the median column and the shape of the ladder appears. Between PSA 2 and PSA 5 the medians sit within about $100 of each other, from $1,035 to $1,128, then the figure roughly doubles at PSA 8, to $2,730, and reaches $4,500 at the lone PSA 10. The money is concentrated at the top of the ladder, not spread evenly along it.

Be careful how much weight you put on the flat middle. Each of those medians rests on two to five sales spread across four years, so they are not a controlled comparison: given two copies of this exact ticket offered side by side today, the higher grade takes the higher price. What the numbers do show reliably is where the scarcity is. Grades 2 to 5 hold 116 of the 202 examples, so a buyer who misses one can wait for the next; only 23 examples have reached PSA 7 or better, and that is where the premium concentrates. Work out which side of that line your ticket sits on before you reach for a percentage.

The single PSA 10 is the best unsigned example that exists, and at $4,500 it is not the most expensive 81-point full ticket by a wide margin. Six signed copies have beaten it, one of them a PSA 1. That is the clearest possible evidence that grade is not the top of the hierarchy.

Step four, separate the signed examples

An autograph does not adjust the price, it replaces the pricing model. Every recorded signed sale of this ticket cleared every recorded unsigned sale, including the PSA 10.

A PSA 1 with a signature sold for $9,760. The best unsigned copy in existence sold for $4,500. Six signed sales, median $9,302, against twenty unsigned sales, median $1,029. On this ticket the signature is worth roughly nine times the ticket.

Note what the label carries: a PSA 5 for the ticket and a PSA/DNA MINT 9 for the signature. These are separate grades for separate things, and confusing them is the most common error in ticket valuation. A listing that advertises this as a "PSA 9" is quoting the autograph.

Putting the four steps together

Take an unsigned PSA 4 standard-variety 81-point full ticket. Step one fixes the variety at set 70589. Step two says 28 of the 202 graded examples are PSA 4, squarely in the crowd. Step three gives four comparable sales, $720 to $1,440, median $1,041, the most recent in January 2026. Step four confirms there is no signature, so the signed ladder does not apply. The answer is roughly $1,000, with real confidence, and every number behind it is checkable.

Change one variable and the method still works. Make it a box office variety and step one moves you to set 193524, where 10 examples exist and the comparable set is far thinner, so the answer widens and leans upward. Add a signature and step four moves you to a ladder starting near $6,800. The method does not change; the inputs do.

What sits behind these numbers

The figures in this guide come from three connected databases, all searchable above. As of 30 July 2026 they hold 84,967 individually graded tickets identified by certification number, 87,132 catalogue varieties across 37,708 PSA sets, 279,911 graded examples counted in the July 2026 population capture, and 17,589 settled graded-ticket sales alongside the lots currently open for bidding.

Population counts are captured on a dated schedule rather than estimated, so a figure quoted here is what PSA reported on a specific day and can be compared against the next capture. Sale prices are realised prices from the auction houses' own published results, and each one keeps its lot link, so any figure in this guide can be checked at source.