Monterey Bay Card Show

When is the next one?

Nobody who runs the show has published a date. We checked on 11 October 2026: the Eventbrite account that listed the 2025 show has no upcoming events, and the 2025 sponsor's website showed no events when we read it.

What does exist is a single entry on a listing site. The Card Shop Finder shows a Monterey Bay Card Show at the Conference Center on Saturday 23 and Sunday 24 January 2027, opening at 10am both days. The same entry says admission "has not been published", names no organiser, and links to a card-database listing instead of to anyone running the show. The weekdays match the dates, so it is not a recycled entry from an earlier year. It is still one unsourced listing.

If you are driving in from out of the area, do not book around January until an organiser repeats those dates. This page will carry the date the day one is published.

What the last show was

• Date and hours: Saturday 29 November 2025, 10am to 6pm, the Saturday after Thanksgiving ( Eventbrite).
• Venue: Monterey Conference Center, 1 Portola Plaza, Monterey.
• Admission: $5, per Monterey County Weekly's listing that week. The Eventbrite page itself shows no ticket price.
• Size: "200-plus tables", in the Weekly's words, with vintage and modern cards "from sports to Pokemon and more".
• Who was behind it: the Eventbrite listing was posted by an organiser account named Jody, and the Pacific Grove Chamber of Commerce listed it as "sponsored by Sharp Corners and Collectables", a card shop at 205 Cypress Avenue in Pacific Grove.

That is one show, so it does not establish a pattern. A November date in 2025 and a January listing for 2027 would mean no show at all in 2026, and nothing we found says whether that is the plan or a gap in the listings.

Three Monterey card shows with nearly the same name

Most of the confusion around this search comes from three separate shows, run by different people in different buildings.

The Monterey Card & Collectible Show is run by World of Sports Memorabilia, whose own table-reservation page gives the December dates and describes sports cards, Pokémon, One Piece, other trading card games, memorabilia, coins and toys. It sells vendor tables only, at $200 for a six-foot table, and showed them as sold out when we read it. It gives no opening hours and no price for visitors. Its June 2026 edition was also promoted as "The Monterey Card Show", which is where a lot of the name overlap starts.

The Crispy Cardboard show is the free one. Its community-calendar listing for 25 July 2026 puts it in the Del Monte Ballroom at the Monterey Beach Hotel with Pokémon, One Piece, sports cards, toys, comics and figures. Listing sites show other 2026 dates for it that disagree with each other, so we give only the one its own listing states.

Which one are you actually looking for?

You want a card show before Christmas. That is the Seaside show on 19–20 December 2026, at the Embassy Suites, not the Conference Center. The organiser has not published hours or a door price, so check with them before you go.

You saw "January 23–24, 2027" somewhere. That is the unconfirmed Conference Center listing described above. It may well turn out to be right. Hold the weekend if you like, and wait for an organiser to say so before paying for anything.

You went last Thanksgiving weekend and assume it is annual. This is the one that can waste a trip. No 2026 show at the Conference Center is listed by the organiser's Eventbrite account, by the sponsor, or by the listing site that carries the 2027 date. Do not turn up at Portola Plaza on the Saturday after Thanksgiving expecting it.

Parking at the Conference Center

The public garages nearest the Conference Center are the City's Downtown East and Downtown West Garages, both listed at 340 Tyler Street.

• Rate, both garages: first hour free, then $1 per 30 minutes or part of it, to a $12 maximum. Rates reset at midnight.
• Size: 590 spaces in the East Garage, 229 in the West.
• Paying: take a ticket at the gate and pay at a pay station before you return to the car. The City lists coins, bills, Visa and MasterCard.
• One catch: the City says the West Garage charges a flat rate at entry "for some special events and night entry", and does not say which events.

All of that is from the City of Monterey's garages page, read 11 October 2026. A full day at a show costs at most $12 to park at those rates, and a visit of under an hour costs nothing.

Questions