Inside the Pack: How to Find a Sports Card Show in Your Area

So you’d like to go to a sports card show in your local area, but you’re not sure where one is. Or maybe you’ve heard about one, but you don’t know all the details of when the show is or how often it’s put on. Fortunately, there are a number of ways to find out where good card shows are near you.

The best first step is to use the Beckett show calendar, available here. While it’s not the most intuitive website in the world, this site does the best job of collating local card shows and sorting them by state. The default display is simply the soonest ones first, so you’ll want to filter to be specific to the state you want to search. Simply scroll down to the bottom of the page and input the state. You can also put a date range to help narrow your search. The results will tell you everything you need to know.

A second internet-based option is to use Facebook groups to ask around. Many of the biggest sports collector groups have near or more than 50,000 members. These collectors come from all around the globe, and you’ll be bound to find someone near you. I’ve seen people set up a carpool to go to a shows that are within a few hours of them on these groups. Networking with other collectors can certainly help track down shows for you to visit.

A low-tech, but still effective, way to find out about shows is to talk to the people who own or work at your local card shop, if you’re lucky enough to have one. I have found that many times these folks are not necessarily vendors at the show, but often know the show promoter and sometimes help advertise for the show or know others who do set up at the show. An added bonus to this is that there may be informal shows, just as trade nights or collector-led gatherings, that the shop knows about.