Navigating Pool Cue Purchase Decisions
The pool cue stick a billiard player purchases and uses can have a great and varied impact on their overall table performance. There are a mind bogglingly-large universe of product options to choose to play with. Many of the options of cue styles and products probably won’t greatly effect play — but there are some that affect the physics involved in the game. For example, a graphite shaft versus a wooden one. These are extremely different materials with properties unique unto themselves. They can’t both be the correct choice, so which one is the best? It’s probably best to accumulate a large consensus of qualified opinions.
A great place to get a diverse array of opinions on which pool cues to use or avoid altogether would be the many various pocket billiard forums and discussion groups that exist all over the internet. It might be advisable to, however, avoid looking exclusively for the advice of what pro players use, because often pro billiard players are endorsed to play with a given cue brand and may even have it highly customized to suit their tastes.
There are also many popular billiard expos (such as the Billiard Congress of America trade show) that can enable you to see some of the pool cues right off the vendor’s shelf, and most often they will even have a pool table with a rack of pool balls to let you try the cue stick out.
Though, it should be mentioned, whenever you change a cue or shaft there is a period of mental adjustment that may take a couple of weeks. It may be difficult to make a definite assessment of a billiard cue stick in a single round of pool, which is a problem if you intend to make a purchase decision on the spot.
There are many pool cue stick brands to choose from. One greatexample is Predator. Predator has created many popular billiard cue stick lines that are popular not just in the U.S., but around the world. Even their name seems to imply aggression, a good game, and ideally… a successful win!
Predator cues are particularly worthy of a mention because of the fact that they are the manufacturers of the popular 314 and Z cue shafts. These pool cue shafts are manufactured for a wide variety of pool cue stick brands, and open up the possibility of customizing the play of your current billiard cue without the need of having to take the pricey leap to a whole new piece.
Check out these other helpful pages: BMC Billiard Sticks, and supply.
