Represent the game as it is. Don't avoid taking pictures of the side that has a big gouge in the cabinet. If you know, if you've got a classic game and the plywood's delaminating, don't just forget to mention that fact. Don't gloss over shit. Highlight the flaws, even. Yeah, people are going to see the game in person anyway, so you're not gaining anything when you try to lie or ignore something you're aware of and i just don't buy it when you show up and someone's like oh huh i didn't notice that bullshit man you've had this thing in your house yeah like you're saying you didn't notice some like if i can spot something within two minutes of looking at game and you've been playing this thing you noticed so don't be a piece of shit that's the top steps if the game does have some lingering issue that you can't figure out or it has damage or something you just take the L tell them and the karma is worth more than the money you think you're gaining from that sure yeah because it'll come back if you're a buyer or seller you're going to be a buyer or then a seller again it's a circle of life like we talked about in the last episode I always say like if I'm looking at an ad I want to see as many pictures as possible I think that that's a lot of people so it's like Take close-up pictures of everything, and anything that has any wear or scratches or whatever, any conditional problems, take pictures and include them. It's better to pull up a post that has 25 pictures than one that has one or two. Especially with older games. On an older game, regardless of if it's in mint condition, shit condition, whatever, you think you might have a game, and you're like, well, this is kind of how, like, it's player's condition. that take if it's an old game and by old i mean anything that's like pre-2010 take tons of pictures it'll save you time in the long run because you don't have to answer questions or what will usually happen is a buyer will be like i want a picture of underneath the play field or i want a picture of the boards in the back box or i want a picture you know like they want pictures of certain things and then they'll ask you and then you'll need to go take a picture and then email them back or whatever or message them back with the pictures of when you could have just fucking had it all on the original post what i do have written down in here is even if you take 100 photos just expect people to ask for one more it fucking always happens they'll be like oh what about the legs and you'll be like what the fuck i've never thought about pinball legs before like there will always be something and i always just try to be i'm just like sure thing just i'm not like i didn't see the photo does it have the original coin box in it or is it like a plastic replacement well like and you're like oh okay yeah people will have things that are important to them they've been listening to podcasts with shitty buyers advice and so just let them go and you know just be friendly with the process and understanding that it a lot of these things are a lot of money almost all of them are a lot of money speaking of a lot of money how what about pricing like how do you price your games and how do you know how to price your game because i think the thing is like a lot of people get into and they go i have the nicest version of whatever this game is they get attached to the game yeah and then they're like this is the average price but mine's really nice or i put all these mods into it or i just cleaned it or whatever like how do you price the game you should probably already have an idea of what the game value is based off of what you paid for it if you bought it within the last couple years anyway because it's like if the game sat there for a month before you bought it you know you paid a little more than the market value because if it was a screaming deal it wouldn't have sat for a month so you can use your common sense and what you paid to you have a ballpark idea like i'm not going to get all of my money back out of it and for the record that's totally fine you bought the thing to play not to get your money back but you you can use that that some pinball machines are investments though oh my god no no no like if i can at best summer a gamble you're like some of them will offset the next game you buy from that manufacturer and lose money on yeah exactly uh so you you should have some idea based off of what you paid but if let's say you just got one from your uncle you have no fucking idea the pin side like we alluded to earlier has a marketplace pinside.com is the big pinball website. We bring it up multiple times in every episode. It's unavoidable. It has a marketplace, and that marketplace does an awesome job of archiving all of the previous listings of that game and determining the average price, the high, low kind of price for it based off of what it's seen in the last, I think it over the last two years or something And they also archive those posts so you can see the pictures too so you can kind of judge oh well this one sold for a little bit more than the median price But also you can tell that it was in better than average condition. Exactly. So that gives you kind of a ballpark idea of what a game is worth. And then you have to adjust accordingly based off of your market and the condition of your game. Like Alan said, everyone always seems to think they have the best one. when I say adjust I don't usually mean adjust higher I don't think like you have to have something fucking special to be asking over average price the average like substantially I'd be more than 100 bucks over average you know it's like if you live in the middle of nowhere you might have to price it a little lower to get someone out to you to drive out to you if there's less fish in the pond if the game is in rough shape you might have to price it a little lower because you know there's some things that will either cost money to replace or it's just it's not worth as much as a clean copy of the game if you want a quick sale you might want to price it a little bit lower there's there's a little bit of a pattern there if you're not noticing if if you treat pinball as a hobby and not an investment and you value your time you realize you're fighting over like a hundred dollars on a seven thousand dollar toy and you're wasting like another week of your life dealing with people off of craigslist sometimes it's worth pricing the game at 5900 hundred bucks instead of six grand money is worth more and less to everybody and i don't want to just be dismissive of the fact that money is real and like that stuff can matter but don't try to squeeze every dollar out of this hobby at the expense of your own sanity yeah because selling a game is i think significantly more annoying than buying a game oh way more annoying yeah dude it can be a nightmare like it might not be as hard because maybe you don't have to make that six hour drive and you don't have to load it necessarily and you can get lucky and have a really nice buyer that just works right away you don't have to deal with any bullshit but when you're like getting messages from that's why i dread when you hit the just general facebook marketplace and suddenly you're getting you're like hey man like oh can i get a picture of this and this and you're you're entertaining someone as if they're serious and then they're like hey would you be interested in trading it for a Yamaha dirt bike? I have a 1997, uh, a wave runner. It doesn't run, but I, I think it would take like $20 to get it running. Yeah, man. Like that stuff. Then you're like, you know what? I'd rather take 500 bucks less and just get this thing gone this weekend. Right. That's the kind of shit. That's what I'm saying. Like value your own time and don't try to squeeze every dollar out of it. Do you ever list things as OBO? Um, or best offer? I may have, I list things for trades occasionally when they're cheap for other pinball machines. But you just specify. Yeah. Like I'm looking for listening to trades for other pinball machines. Yeah. I usually don't. I probably do put best offer in there or something. But a lot of the time, then you get people lowballing you right away. Then I usually just hit them like, hey, I mean, I listed this yesterday. So I'm going to wait to see. That's what I usually just say because that's the truth. I'm like, if someone offers me 500 bucks less on an expensive game and you're like, I'm going to give it two weeks. you know because you're like i have 500 bucks is real money i don't want to like fuck you know something like that you're like no i think i had a price fair i'm going to give it two more weeks because just people need to see it i would recommend not so just but it's like you're gonna get lowballed either way i think you're gonna get lowballed either way if you add obo you're gonna just get you said or best offer you know like back to the ad itself though in like photos if you're taking if you're selling a modern game we were talking about older games earlier you know things are variable then you really want to document everything good or bad you want to show like hey this thing is really meant or hey this thing is pretty beat here's all like the problems or whatever here's the playfield where here's the scratches on the cabinet yep modern games though you really only need a handful of because it's like we know what the game looks like things don't generally wear out much you can put photos of the commonware areas everybody loves putting a photo of the fucking ball the the launch lane as if that's like as if they're going to get $800 more because they put a little protector in there and they turn the the ball kick out power down so that wood looks like it's never been touched before you're like i don't know of anyone who's paying more for the shooter like i don't understand that like i know that guys obsess over it but i'm like funny because it's like yeah people all value i guess that's what they want to see when they go to buy a game so if you're someone like a modern game you can basically be like oh it's clean i here's here's three photos of the game just so there's like photos of it overall and then you can put in any actual problems that are noteworthy like oh here's a close-up of where like the side of the cabinet was nicked or whatever but you really don't need a lot of photos of a modern game if you're selling to like new buyers normies a lot of the time in my experience just having like nice photos matters more than actual like good documentation i sold my high speed which was the first pinball machine i ever owned and i took photos of it there were bad photos for actually buying the game in retrospect but it's like i took photos of it it was sitting in my buddy's arcade and so i took photos in the dark all lit up and like some led spotlights and stuff so it just like looked cool right hey you can get this cool pinball machine and someone came to pick it up and they're like oh we just loved how yours looked so bright compared to all the other like we just wanted to pinball machine for our game room and this one just like looks so cool and bright like they just kept bringing them like well that's because the iphone pictures just were completely blown out in the game it's like glowing because it's in a dark room or whatever yeah but you're like, yeah, like, you know, it does have LEDs in it. So like, I got you like, nothing was dishonest about this. But you're like, yeah, I think the photo genuinely sold that one. Because it's like, I had a cool thumbnail photo. And I think that's what those people bought off of. You know, if you're selling like a no, a new Stern, just maybe keep that in mind, be like, I'm gonna actually take a decent photo, lead with a good thumbnail. Because when you're selling to casual buyers, first time buyers that haven't owned a pinball machine before, that does matter a lot making that impact. You have here, it says, if you're listed in multiple spots, save yourself a headache and put your location in the text body at the bottom. Is this a common thing you see with sellers? It drives me nuts. If you post on, it's a problem mainly on Facebook, because if you post in the general marketplace, that will obviously have your location tagged with it. Like it shows when you click on a general marketplace ad, like, oh, this person's located in Portland. But when you post in the general marketplace, it will be like, do you want to share this in your other groups and you can just click like oh i want to share this west coast pinball collectors i want to share this with the pacific northwest or whatever and so people do that it gets posted everywhere in those groups your location does not necessarily translate to and so a lot of the time you'll see a listing it's a very common thing to see a listing in a facebook group it has huge ad written out tons of photos no location the guy's profile is private or doesn't have a location on it at all there's zero idea where it is and then you just everybody has to ask where's this game located it's a common thing drives me nuts i always have to ask people if i'm actually interested in the game so it's like just put the location in the ad especially if you're if you're copying and pasting across multiple places which i would recommend doing just copying and pasting the same ad four times yeah you should be listed in all the places yep the other thing i would say is just helpful to put in your ad is your loadout situation if the game's in a garage if there's going to be steps much like representing the game fairly it doesn't do anybody any favors to show up and then be like oh fuck the game's upstairs and you're like yeah like if you have four front steps say four front steps off the porch like just let them know because they can plan appropriately if you're able to help someone carry a game or you have your wife megan you know that you're like yeah my wife will help throw it in the car with you you're over there counting the money yeah and then she's helping load load the machine but no regardless of your situation if you're like hey my back hurts like, hey, this is cheap. I'm not going to help you load whatever, whatever the situation is, put that in your ad. It will just help people plan accordingly. It'll waste less of everybody's time. Just transparency in general. Yeah, I think that's everything for the ad itself. The last piece of this is buyer time when the actual buyer shows up, or I guess when you're picking a buyer, when you're talking to these people. First top tip is use common sense. I grew up on the internet, so I can recognize scammers pretty easily, but people still get scammed a lot more than you would think with even shit as big and simple as a pinball machine people will strap a game to a pallet accept a zelle payment or some shit and then the game will be halfway around the world and the payment gets canceled because it's zelle this there's a reason i only do in-person sales i would ship if it was someone vetted online but i don't really want to deal with strapping a game to a pallet not only do you have to arrange it but you have to pack it Yeah it a pain in the ass Yeah that would be a pain So I always sell in person Even living in a relatively small city in the Midwest I was able to sell a couple games for the prices I wanted without issue fairly quick People, I mean, if you live in the middle of nowhere, chances are, like, if you live in the Midwest, you're used to driving long distance to buy games. Other guys are too. It's not that weird. It might just take some more patience. You might have to do a little bit of a price cut. But, like, I prefer selling in person. That's just what I try to do. I buy games in person. I sell them in person. That makes sense to me, dude. Shipping games is like... Shipping games is just kind of sketchy. It's sketchy for the buyer and it's sketchy for the seller. Yeah, it's just not fun. But I know a lot of people do it in certain rare titles. Like, if you want... Yeah, man, when's the last time you saw a Stargazer for sale in the Pacific Northwest? Exactly. Yeah, like, in certain rare games, like, your only option might be to find a... hopefully a vetted seller on Pinside and then have them ship it to you and you're going to pay for the... extra for the shipping and you're probably going to pay a little bit more for that game if it would have been local just for the seller to have to you know deal with that deal with it because they're they're going to want to sell locally too yeah it's way easier to be like yeah i can be there tomorrow yeah then you being like oh i guess i gotta call dhl and uh you know ship this bitch up and plastic wrap it well and it's also it's like if you're buying a big expensive thing just make a day of it go drive you don't get in your car or whatever you can go a long way with a single overnight trip to go get. If you're buying a $10,000 toy, man, you can spend the weekend getting it. Yeah, totally. It's part of the experience at some level, so I'm always just trying to do things. You said on the last game that you drove 12 hours to get your Hobbit. Something like that. I'd have to double check. That was a long drive. That was one way, 12 hours? Yeah. No, maybe that was- Or it was six and six. I'd have to look it up in the Google. I've lost all semblance of reality in the Midwest because things are so different. Cities are so spread out there compared to what I complain about on the West Coast. Like I bitch now when I drive like 30 minutes across town, like fucking A. And it's like, I used to just hop in the car on, like I remember I went and got my EM, my Williams Cabaret, real banger title for like 250 or 300 bucks or whatever. And it got listed and I was like, hey, this is cool. And the guy was out in like small town, Minnesota. And I hopped in my truck. I left work at like 2 p.m., hopped in my truck, drove four hours, got there by 6 p.m., loaded up, got home by 10.30. and I'm like I got a pinball machine it's like I saw it that day and I spent eight hours in my truck to get it yeah it's just like yeah but that's like the thing when you're into pinball you're like don't be like it's fun and then what's funny is like I sold that game you know a year later when I moved or whatever for $300 and you're like yeah so it's like my only time invested was that one day and that day it's like I spent gas but it was fun they got a good dude you got to enjoy the process if you're going to own pinball machines because yep it can be annoying to buy and it can be annoying to sell. Yep. Another top tip, they've got these really cool pens that you can use to check if money is real. Do you ever use these, Alex? No. Why not? Because I'm not a nerd.