OCD Special: Counting Cards In A Binder

Gonna break up the football listings to bring you a quick exhibition of OCD overkill.  When I counted my entire collection in late 2019, part of the labor was counting binders that either contained partial sets, or player collections or other various hordes that had to be tallied individually or at least page by page.  For some of my sets, I have the stars elsewhere, or in the case of player or oddball collections, there's no target number, so you can't just count the empty spaces and subract from the set count.

So what's the most efficient method for counting up bindered cards?  You could go through and keep adding up the number on each page, but I tend to lose track after about halfway through and have to start over...

You could write down each page's count and add them up at the end, but that's a lot of button punching...

What I found that went the fastest was to count the total number of pages in the book, multiply by the slots per page (generally 9) then subtract the empty slots to get the total. 

So flip through once really quick and get the page count, then go back and count the empty slots on each page.  Sometimes I could keep that total in my head and just recorded it in my notes, like below:

So my baseball star binder had 58 pages (with 9 slots each) minus 40 empties.  Add in the oddball sized pages toward the back (41 cards) and you get a total of 523 cards in the whole thing.

That book isn't real big, so it didn't take much to knock it out.  My other set binders were a bit more dense, so I went a little slower and tallied each empty as I was counting pages.  That way I still only had to keep track of one number as I went.  Here's the rest of that notes page:

As you can see, even in a complete set, I might have empty places.  It depends how the set is organized in the binders.  In numeric order, the only empty spaces are missing cards, but if I sorted it by teams (and put the leaders, checklists, etc. in the front), each team or group may start on a fresh page.  Or I might skip a slot or two to keep a couple cards together, like variations or the World Series subset, etc.  

So I counted total pages, and then could add up the tallies very fast.  No calculator needed.

Now in my player collections, there could be the occasional tenth card on a page (like multiple oddballs in a pocket, or a Topps Micro on top of its regular size compatriot.) So you have to skip the next empty spot and the count evens out. 

And of course, if you double bag, you multiply by 18 and count empties on both sides of the page.

Hope that saves somebody some time!