Hello everyone.

Many collectors specialize in certain areas in numismatics. For some, it may be US coins, world coins, ancients, errors, cobs/milled Spanish reales, or tokens. While all of these have many different “guidelines” on how they are to be collected, it is generally accepted that the better the condition of a coin, the greater the value/price will be for the said coin. However, lowball collectors look for one specific thing: coins that are so heavily worn down that they usually have only a basic design left.

Now, this is certainly a strange way to collect, and why would anyone pay significantly more for a slick coin in a PO-01 slab than an example of the same date in an MS64 slab you may ask? Well, that would be up to personal choice. Some lowball collectors collect them because of a lowball coin’s very authentic ties to history. It would get one to think the age-old question “what has this 300-year-old coin been through?”

Another strange reason for lowball collecting would be because some people find “slicked-out” coins oddly attractive. Have you ever seen an Ike dollar in PO-01? Or even a silver eagle that hasn’t existed for more than ten years? There’s something unexplainably beautiful about modern designs in low grade, mainly because it’s something we never really get to see since coins like Ike dollars or ASEs aren’t part of general circulation.

Now, one has to understand that just because a coin is heavily worn down does not mean that it is worth a lot. It really depends on what the coin is. For example, there is an overwhelming supply of barber dimes in PO-01 grade; but the same cannot be said for Susan B. Anthony dollars. With this scenario in mind, the laws of supply and demand are prevalent.

By this point, it should be obvious that most modern lowball specimens were not circulated naturally.� Most people will not just get an Ike dollar in change and spend it like a one-dollar bill. This is where the term “pocket piece” comes in. A pocket piece is a coin that someone carries in their pocket primarily to wear down (although sometimes it can be used for conversational reasons, such as an UNC morgan dollar in an air-tite) its surfaces and get it to a slick PO-01 grade for the reasons discussed above.

Lowball coins are certainly very interesting. Next time you see a coin in low condition, think of what its been through! Do you have your own pocket piece? Let me know in the comments please!