The text that started Blez

The text that started Blez

Blez turns ten this November. The short version we usually give is that two brothers who grew up collecting started a breaking business in 2016, which is true and leaves out almost everything interesting about it.

So we asked Scott to write down how it actually happened. What follows is his account, in his words. It involves a card shop on Long Island, the YouTube channel that got him into box breaks, and a deep run at the World Series of Poker that nearly meant none of this existed.

---

Bookmarx and Topps Chrome

Thirty years ago I opened my first pack of 1996-97 Topps Chrome Basketball. It is my first memory of the hobby, and it set off a chain of events nobody could have predicted.

That was a loaded rookie class. Allen Iverson, Kobe Bryant, Ray Allen, Steve Nash. We had a shop in our town on Long Island called Bookmarx, and our parents took us weekly. Topps Chrome Basketball was our favorite. Part of it was the price, $4 a pack or three for $10, which meant our parents would buy us three packs each to get the deal. The rest of it was the chrome itself, and those shiny refractors.

I was a curious six years old and I fell in love with it. My brother Jared and I obsessed over basketball. We watched games on TV, wore our favorite players' jerseys, played in the driveway, played each other in video games, and most importantly collected the cards. I went to Bookmarx at least once a week for most of my life, right up until I left for UMass in 2008.

Most kids who collect leave the hobby around middle school or early high school. Jared moved on to other interests around high school. People told me I’d grow out of it. I never did. I have never lost the love of ripping packs, trading, selling, and chasing the next top rookie, but there was a major problem. There was no obvious way to make a career out of any of it. That pathway didn’t exist. You owned a shop or it was a hobby and nothing more. That is where things sat until 2007.

2007: box breaks on YouTube

YouTube was new. SNL started posting Lazy Sunday and there other viral shorts, and suddenly people were on there. And you could find all kinds of weird stuff and niche people. so I started searching it to see what other people in the card space were doing. I found an account called cardsfinity. He was the first person I know of to record himself ripping a box on camera for a box break, and I was hooked immediately. I loved watching other people open product. Their excitement. Their joy. It was a thrill to be a part of.

Cardsfinity uploaded at least five videos a day. That channel started the trend, and other collectors slowly began recording their own rips or showing off their collections. A small community of dedicated collectors was forming, and I was all in.

Between 2007 and 2009 I must have watched thousands of card videos, mostly box breaks. In the hobby, but I needed a job and I needed to make money. In 2009 I gathered up some confidence, pieced together equipment, and recorded myself ripping a personal box with my youngest brother as my accomplice. I kept recording breaks for my own channel over the next few years while watching everyone else's. It was a lot of fun, opening boxes from a laptop on my couch, doing it with my family, and just enjoying the community it formed. But it wasn’t a job.

2009: group breaking

Group breaking took the YouTube card community to another level. We could talk to collector friends in a live chat while watching boxes and cases get broken. My favorite breaker when it started was thetruth17, known now as Firehand Cards, and most nights you would find me in his chat talking, trolling, and watching whatever he was hosting.

That changed the dynamic permanently. You weren’t an individual your friends and family thought was crazy, you were part of a community meeting people who cared the way you did. And the industry was still in its infancy.

2015: The Backer comes back

In 2015 I was living in New York, working part-time at CBS Sports and at a ticketing agency. I had no real direction and no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I was not on track.

Jared texted me on a day like any other: “are there any products worth ripping for fun?”. He had been out of the hobby for at least ten years, so the text was not expected. He had spent those years playing poker — a wild story in itself. He dropped out of college at eighteen with a thousand dollars and a dream and turned it into a living.

I knew the market, so I told him to rip a case of 2015 Topps Chrome Football, and I had one of my other favorite breakers, Pfudd, ship him a case.

As you well know all it takes is one good rip. He hit a Todd Gurley Rookie Superfractor Autograph on his return to the hobby, and he was hooked again immediately. We talked about cards constantly over the next several weeks, he ripped a lot of personal boxes, he became a regular at his homestown shop in Scottsdale, and he had Pfudd ship him more.

2016: starting Blez (or Blez might not have existed)

That July Jared went deep in the World Series of Poker Main Event.

Blez probably would not exist if he had won it. He would have taken home $8 million, and I did not want to be the brother leeching off him after a win like that. Thankfully, he lost!

All said and done, he placed 16th for $338,000 instead, and he still had an interest in cards after the deep run. So on a dreary afternoon in September, when the city is so hot it's uncomfortable, I finally texted him and told him we needed to start our own breaking business. He was in Arizona and I was in New York, so we made a plan to discuss it together in NYC.

I showed him some of our eventual competitors. He was fascinated, and he agreed we had to do it. He secured as much National Treasures, Flawless, and Immaculate as he could before our first show in mid-November 2016. We brought in Damon, my brother's best friend, before we launched, and we knew our youngest brother would join when he graduated college in the spring of 2017.

It has been almost ten years since that first live show. It started with three of us. Now it’s over 100 employes millions and millions of cards and 10s of thousands of customers and friends. The community kept growing and we couldn’t be more proud of people we’ve brought in and broken with over the years. The cards are the prize, the people make the hobby.

It started as a bright eyed 6 year old, now I’m still here buying, selling, ripping and collecting. And I’m not going anywhere. We still break live, and in July 2025 we launched Blez Online so collectors could rip when we were not on.

Blez Online has been one of the most fun things I have ever worked on and has coincided with my favorite year in the hobby to date. But that story is for another time.