Setting Up Your First Show Before You Drive

The work that makes a show go well happens the night before, not at the table. Here is the pass to run before you load the car.

A new vendor's first show usually gets judged on the wrong moment. People remember how the table looked at 9am, but the thing that actually decided the day happened the night before: whether the stock was loaded, the prices were set, and the phone was ready to run the table without a hitch. If you are getting ready for your first show with CardOps, this is the pass to run before you drive.

This matters more than a normal setup checklist because of how the free tier works. A free vendor gets Show Mode, Show Prep, and per-show profit and loss in full on their first show. That means this one run is the whole workflow on the table at once, not a trimmed-down preview of it.

Put the show on the calendar first

Everything else in CardOps hangs off a show existing in the app, so start there. Open Show Prep and add the show with its date and name before you do anything else. The free tier caps you at one live show on the calendar at a time, and that cap only counts shows that are still open. Once you close out a show, it stops counting against the limit, so there is no cost to getting this on the calendar early.

Putting the show in now, even days ahead, also gives you a place to stage everything that follows: the stock you pull, the prices you set, and the notes you want in front of you at the table.

Load the stock you are actually taking

Your full inventory and your show inventory are rarely the same thing. Most vendors carry far more stock than fits in one case, so the show list is a subset: the cards you pulled because they move, because they fit the show's audience, or because you want them out of the box after sitting for a while. Go through what you are physically packing and make sure every card in the box is also a card in the app before you zip it shut.

For anything that is not already on file, the camera scanner matches it against a catalog of more than 20,000 Pokemon cards and attaches a market value on the spot, so you are not typing in names, set numbers, and conditions by hand the night before a show. A few minutes with the scanner covers a shoebox of singles faster than data entry ever would.

If your stock already lives in a spreadsheet, CSV import is free on every tier. Bring the whole file in at once rather than re-entering cards you have already catalogued elsewhere, and reserve the scanner for whatever the spreadsheet does not already cover. The goal for this step is simple: nothing goes in the car that is not also in your pocket.

Set your floor prices while you are calm

Prices you set the night before, sitting at a table with no one watching, are almost always better than prices you set in the first five minutes of a show with a line forming. Work through your stock and set a number you are comfortable selling at, using the market value and trend history CardOps already attached when you scanned each card. Doing this in advance also means you walk in with a plan instead of pricing on the fly between customers, which is when rushed numbers tend to slip too low or scare a buyer off by running too high.

This is also the moment to decide your floor on anything you expect to get a lowball offer on, especially higher-value singles where a confident buyer will test you. Knowing your number before a buyer opens with theirs means a friendly "what's your best on this?" does not push you into a sale you will regret by the time you are packing up. Write nothing down on paper to forget at home; it lives with the card in the app, ready the moment you open the case.

Confirm the table runs without wifi

Convention wifi is unreliable precisely when you need it most, which is why Show Mode is built to run the whole table from your phone without depending on a connection. Searching your inventory, ringing a sale, logging a trade, and recording a buy all happen on the device, and everything syncs once you are back online. The night before is the time to confirm this for yourself, not discover it mid-show when a buyer is standing there waiting on you.

Open Show Mode, put your phone in airplane mode, and walk through a mock sale, a trade, and a buy. Nothing should hesitate or throw an error. If it all behaves the same with the network off as it does with it on, you know the table will hold up regardless of what the venue's wifi does the next day, whether that is a packed hall with a thousand phones fighting for the same signal or a hotel ballroom with no public network at all.

Do one dry run on the dashboard

Before you close the app for the night, check the dashboard. It should show the show you just created, zeroed out and ready, with your loaded inventory reflected in total value. This is a quick sanity check that everything you did in the last hour actually landed: the stock is there, the show is there, and the two are connected.

Because there is no account to sign into and your data lives on the device and in your own private iCloud, there is nothing else to configure here. If the dashboard looks right, the setup is done.

Know what happens when the show ends

One more thing worth knowing before you drive: CardOps totals per-show profit live as you sell, trade, and buy, so you are not reconstructing the day's numbers from memory afterward. When the show is over and you close it out in the app, that is also the moment that frees up your one-show slot on the free tier for the next show you book. There is no rush to do this the second you pack the car, but it is worth knowing that closing out is what moves you forward, not just the calendar date passing.