At least they get Seidels too...

https://www.etsy.com/listing/1274884...avatar-t-shirt

Full tilt was so cool, I mean it's like they weren't even trying hard and got it done. Like 10 years later everyone jumped on the avatars bandwagon.

The ad says there is only one left, tempting especially considering you can make 4 payments of 14.99.

I liked how you could switch the emotions on the fly, animate them like they were laughing.

Not a bad deal if you're looking for something to use in an emergency when you run out of toilet paper.

It seems appropriate for this song to be played in honour of this thread- https://youtu.be/PngHldUW-Os

What would my "Amarillo Slim autographed Ace of Spades" be worth ?

Unfortunately the value may not be that great.

I say this a) because I found this article https://eu.amarillo.com/story/news/l...s/13126911007/ stating that shortly before he passed away he signed
46 decks of cards on a plane ride and that was when he was 83 years of age, so one wonders how many he may have signed during his poker life and how many are still in circulation.

Of course, the Ace of Spades may have 54 times the rarity value of other cards in the deck, unless he was signing special decks that were all the ace of spades!

Coincidentally, an ad has kept popping up recently on various web sites I've been on pushing Cristiano Ronaldo signed memorabilia, stuff that is new to market. Top sports people are well known, particularly in the modern era, for regularly spending bursts of time, 30 minutes to an hour, signing and signing and signing photos of themselves, boots, footballs, jerseys etc, obviously because the hourly is very attractive.

One person very well known for doing that was Muhammed Ali. Consequently there is a big supply of Ali "signed gloves" out there, but virtually zero of them were fight worn gloves or even training session worn. They are just from his signature production line stints. Yes they still have a value but typically that value is the value of the boxing gloves themselves, plus any presentation case they might be in, plus some labour of when it was put together. There isn't much premium on top of that value, any premium was already pocketed by Ali and his memorabilia agent/company when the gloves first went on to the market.

The key component as I mentioned, for most sports memorabilia to be of a much higher value, is if it's "game worn/used", again there are lots of baseball uniforms (jerseys) and baseballs signed by some of the all time greats, but the same thing, mostly signed on a production line signing stint, and often long after the player retired. There are lots of forgeries too, where the baseball is "right", meaning of the playing era of the famous player, but a forged signature has been added at a much later time, often decades later.

So my guess regarding signed playing cards by an iconic poker player, is that it would probably need to be the actual winning cards that the player won the last hand of the WSOP ME with and with provenance proving such, e.g. an identifiable photo of the same two cards with the same pattern and design, or of the player signing the cards.

So although it's a cool item that you have, the valuation might not be tree fiddy cents, but it could be something like $35, that's my guess anyway.

Source of most of the above: not "trust me bro", but from me watching more than I should have of the antiques and memorabilia type TV reality shows. Stopped watching them about 10 years ago.

Cool post, PPD.

My previous employer used to run a live/silent auction as a department fundraiser. The person in charge (and the members of his staff) were complete novices when it came to sports memorabilia. Whenever they got items to sell, I always went through them to be sure they were being presented accurately.

Now, I don't claim to be an expert by any means, but I know just enough to look for some of the more obvious red flags. The incorrect ball is just such an example: if someone tried to sell me a Lou Gehrig-signed baseball, but the ball was a Rawlings with Bobby Brown's name on it, I'm laughing the guy out of the room. But if someone was to show me a card and ask if it was NM-MT8 vs NM7, well, I just don't have that kind of eye. You get the idea.

There were two items he tried to sell that I begged and pleaded he either take off the table, or at least correct the description:

• An autographed Tiger Woods pin flag from a recent Masters at that time.

• An autographed photo of either Tom Glavine or John Smoltz (can't remember which one). The Atlanta Braves donated it for the event.

But here's the problem: for the Tiger Woods flag, my friend or one of his employees embellished the description in the auction program to imply that it was from the actual course, as opposed to being the flag you can buy at the merch shop. As I understand it, the actual flags on the course do not have the year on it, whereas the souvenir versions have the year. This one had the year.

The Braves pitcher photo was one of those reprints that were quite common in the gift shops back in the day. (Haven't seen them recently, perhaps because of such confusion.) In other words, get a player to sign a photo, make hundreds of prints of that signed photo, then sell it at the gift shop for $5 or whatever. The Braves did not in any way suggest the autograph was an authentic signature. And should be quite apparent that it wasn't real in the same way that a framed poster of the Mona Lisa isn't the actual Mona Lisa.

To set a maximum bid for a collectible (I'll spare you the story for why there was even a max bid), I believe the staff often went to eBay to get a ballpark figure. Of course, that could result in wildly inaccurate assessment if the eBay version was decidedly more rare.

Fortunately, no one bid on the Tiger flag. Anyone willing to shell that kind of money probably knew to look at what it actually was. However, the Glavine photo DID sell. The auction staff listed it as an autographed photo, and the woman who bought it didn't know to look closely at the signature to see that it was part of the reprint – i.e. the ink was not on the surface of the item. My staff brought it up at the post-event meeting, but it was yet another example of the communications staff being "Debbie Downer" types to the marketing staff.

Anyway, your post and the discussion above it reminded me of those days.

Very nice post too, Sir.

Yeah, sports memorabilia is an absolute minefield, with most of it being close to worthless.

On top of that, even something that is 100% provably genuine, if we stand back for a moment and really think about it, is it still really worth a lot? IMO, nearly always no.
For me it would have to be something like the actual baseball that was hit for a game winning home run in the World Series, or the football used in the 1966 FIFA World Cup Final,
otherwise, for me at least, it is kind of meaningless, even if it is a genuine game worn Jersey that say Joe DiMaggio wore in one of the 100s of games that he played.

I mean, as an example of how IMO something needs to (and maybe should) have to have an earth shattering history for it to truly be of great value, 200 metres from
where I am sitting is a 1500s original building where Oliver Cromwell (the leader of The English Republic) stayed while plotting some parts of the coup against the Monarchy in 1649.

I can go out and touch that building or go inside it. Does that make it special or make me feel special or bring a fuzzy feeling?, well no, because Cromwell stayed in hundreds of buildings during his life and career. It is just a building.

Show me the axe (if it still exists) which on the orders of Cromwell beheaded King Charles I, and now we are talking. And the value of the axe, well millions, if not priceless.

Thanks. (I happened to be on a flight out of Dallas with Slim and Puggy Pearson about 50 years ago. I recognized Slim. My luggage got lost, as did Slim's. While we were waiting at the luggage counter to file reports, I watched him fill in his name, then I pulled an Ace from a deck I had in my carry-on and asked him for an autograph.)

(I got a Muhammed Ali autograph under similar circumstances, there were only three passengers on that flight into Chicago Midway, me, Ali and his girlfriend. Ali was friendly and talked about his upcoming "fight" with that wrestler in Japan.)

"I'm sorry, Sir, I run a Pawn Shop, and I am in business to make money and as fascinating as those two stories are, do you have proof of either of them?.... (long pause and no answer from the seller). Look I'll give you 50 bucks for the pair. That's the best I can do."

Dialogue, courtesy of Rick Jnr, Pawn Stars.

He has probably uttered those same words in about 50 episodes of the show.

Your take on memorabilia is similar to mine and certainly a common one. I feel it comes up whenever a WSOP bracelet goes up for sale on eBay. Such a weird thing to want. Sure, it's an item that should be significant to whoever won it, and maybe to someone who happened to be on the rail, but rarely to a random buyer. Even if the bracelet was historically significant, like Stu Ungar's 1997 Main bracelet, the novelty would wear off pretty quickly when I find out it was purchased from some pawn shop on Las Vegas Boulevard.

I had a co-worker at the Sacramento River Cats who had the game program and the ticket stub for Sandy Koufax's perfect game back in 1965. Like a moron, I asked him where he got it. His answer was something along the lines of "Duh, I was THERE."

His having those two items is kind of cool. There are only about 30,000 people in the world who can rightfully say they attended that game, a good percentage of them are no longer with us, and very, very few of the remaining people kept anything to show it.
Definitely a conversation piece to a baseball fan, which will be anyone walking through those offices in the first place.

On the other hand, suppose he had the very same thing on his wall but because bought it from some auction 20 years ago. The conversation would be more like, "Oh, nice. So... can you email me that thing we talked about yesterday?"

And yeah, if someone owns a collectible because of the potential ROI, well, at least there's a practical reason for having it. But that doesn't become cool until he sells it, at which point he no longer has it to show me. So until that sale, seeing some potentially valuable piece of memorabilia is about as interesting to me as when someone goes 10 minutes on how their fantasy draft went.

EDIT: Oops, forgot to post this... loosely related to this thread is one of my favorite 2+2 thread ever, the sports memorabilia draft from almost 10 years ago: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/4...lieve-1351476/

I'm not trying to sell either. I can't sell anyone the experience anyway. (Fwiw, the Ali meeting was entertaining to me. He stood facing me in the gate area , talking about the "fight", while snapping punches at my face, basically saying, "He has never seen speed like this".)

but I would sure snap sell the Amarillo Slim card for $50.

Howard Lederer & Chris Ferguson got way too much crap when Full Tilt closed down.

It wasn't their fault. They ran an amazing site.

It was the US governments fault that Full Tilt got shut down.

The government can lock you in your house during Covid, send you off to war, shut your business and there's not a damb thing you can do about it.

The bigger the government the worse all our lives become.

Who's fault was it when they spent all the players money on themselves and couldn't pay out withdrawals?

It sounds like there are some gaping holes in what you know about Full Tilt Poker

Wow, I think some pages might be missing in your history book.

I never even played at FT and know it's history.....bahahahaha holy hell and Jesus Christ someone's one hellva terrible history teacher.


Cheers!!!

Would not even read it if they would give me 59.97 for it.

These three posts made me literally ell oh ell.

In before he says he was just winding us up.

Nonsense.

Of course they had shared responsibility,

FullTilt was running on empty, kiting depostis because they could not process them, etc ...created massive unfunded player liability by issuing chips for which they had no funding or processing. . But for PokerStars buying the company, FullTilt players would have lost literally hundreds of millions.

(The irony is that had BTC and decentralized crypto been around, they could have processed deposits they instead kited. )

Seems pretty messed up the Braves donated a cheap print to a fundraising auction.

Nah, my guess is they didn't know it would be misrepresented and sold for way more than it costs in their gift shop. It's quite possible they didn't know it was going to be auctioned off. A lot of these things are donated as prizes for raffles and giveaways.

In fact, we used to get requests for OUR swag – usually posters and banners – to elementary and middle schools to award as prizes. Sounds nice, but I found out very early in my career that these are often people posing as teachers, when in fact they were actually folks looking to flip items on eBay. Still amuses me that there might possibly be someone willing to spend $15 on, oh, the Cal State Bakersfield volleyball media guide from 1997.

One of the better requests I ever got was from someone claiming to run a high school yearbook. He wanted copies of our media guides, under the guise that it provided his students with design and editorial ideas. I offered him PDFs. Nope, he wanted hard copies, which was a red flag that he was a wannabe collector/dealer. So I grabbed a batch of extra copies, cut off the upper corner of the covers, then mailed the set to him. If he was truly a school yearbook adviser, the altered publications would still serve their educational purpose. Of course, it was pretty clear he was looking to add to some lame-ass online store, and these physically damaged guides would do him no good.

Dang. Sucks there are so many shady people out there misrepresenting themselves to flip some crap on eBay.