Card centering tool

What centering is

Centering is how evenly the printed face of a card sits inside its cut. Every sheet of cards is printed, then cut, and the cut is never perfect: on one card the left border comes out a hair wider than the right, on the next the picture rides high. Graders write it as a split. A card whose left border takes 55% of the two side borders and whose right takes 45% is 55/45 left to right. Dead centre is 50/50.

It’s measured twice on each side, once across and once up and down, and the worse of the two is the one that counts. A card that’s a clean 50/50 side to side but 70/30 top to bottom is a 70/30 card. The back is measured the same way, and graders allow it to be further off than the front.

Centering is one of four things a grader scores, with corners, edges and surface. It’s the only one you can measure with a ruler, which is why it’s worth checking first: a card that’s off-centre has a ceiling no matter how sharp its corners are.

For the other three, the AI card grader scores every corner and edge and the surface from a photo of each side, and measures the centering for you.

How to check centering from a photo

1. Take the card out of its sleeve and toploader. Plastic adds glare and a second set of edges. Lay it on a plain, dark surface.
2. Shoot it square-on. Hold the phone flat above the card, not at an angle, so the card is a rectangle in the frame and not a trapezium. Fill most of the frame. A tilted photo makes the near border look wider than it is.
3. Add the photo. With “Place the guides for me” ticked, the card is found and straightened to fill the frame, and all eight guides are placed for you. It takes about 15 seconds.
4. Check every line in the close-up. Yellow guides sit on the card’s four cut edges, blue guides on where the border ends and the frame or artwork begins. Pick a line and the close-up shows that spot four times the size. Drag the line, or tap the arrow buttons to move it a hair at a time; hold one down to keep it moving. An automatic reading is a starting point, not the last word, and the back is the side it gets wrong most often.
5. Placing them by hand? Untick the box before you add the photo, use the straighten slider until the card’s top edge runs level, then drag each guide into place.
6. Do the back as well. On a Pokémon card that’s the dark blue border around the Poké Ball design.

No camera to hand? Switch to “Type in measurements” and enter the four border widths from a ruler or a loupe with a scale. Any unit works so long as all four use the same one.

Where the border ends on a Pokémon card

• Yellow-border cards, from Base Set through Sword & Shield: measure the yellow, from the cut edge to the inside edge of the yellow.
• Silver-border cards, Scarlet & Violet onwards: the same, on the grey border.
• Full arts, illustration rares and alternate arts still have a thin border around the artwork. It’s narrow, so zoom in and take your time: a small slip with the guide is a big change in the split.
• The back is the same on every English card: the blue border between the cut edge and the inner frame.

PSA and CGC centering limits

These are the grading companies’ own published figures, checked Sep 29, 2026. The first number is the most the wider border may take.

PSA words these as approximate, and adds that a grader may allow a small variance for a card with strong eye appeal. Source: PSA grading standards.

CGC publishes centering figures for trading card games at its two 10 grades only. Its figures for 9 and below are stated for sports and non-sports cards, so they are not applied here. Source: CGC Cards grading scale.

We haven’t listed Beckett or TAG. Their standards pages couldn’t be read on the day we checked, and a centering limit quoted from memory is worse than none.

How accurate is this?

The arithmetic is exact. The measurement is as good as the photo and your eye. On a card photographed square-on and filling the frame, a careful pair of guides lands within a point or so of a ruler. The things that throw it off:

• A tilted shot. The nearer border looks wider. If the card’s edges aren’t parallel in the photo, retake it.
• A sleeve or a slab. You’ll find the edge of the plastic, not the card.
• Thin borders. On a full art, one pixel is a bigger share of the border, so the figure moves more with each nudge.
• Miscuts and tilt. A card cut at an angle has a border that’s wider at one end than the other. Measure at the middle of each side, and know a grader will mark the tilt down as well.

And centering is a ceiling, never a grade. A 50/50 card with a whitened corner isn’t a 10. Once you know the ceiling, the grading calculator tells you whether the card is worth sending at all, fee and shipping included, and is it worth grading? walks through the judgement. If you haven’t priced the card yet, start with the price checker.