I am playing with new sets of balls and clean and polish them daily with a Diamond ball polisher.
They still gear, kick and skid all the time compared to the old Centennials.
Perhaps the cloth is a factor?
Bill S.
yup, me and Bobby Cotton (you sold him his cue in 74) came to this conclusion too. we played for 2 years with several brand new centennials and have a Diamond polisher. We got less skids and kicks when the balls were clean. We think its the cloth as well, when it gets dirty(from chalk and talc) we would get more skids hitting 1/2 ball hits playing 1P than anything else, we played in Vegas and I am certain the dry air there adds to that problem, in LA when the tables are wet there are less skids than when the tables are dry.
We used Aramith balls(the good ones) & Centennial balls(they both the same interms of bad contacts, skids, kicks, hops etc) we used measles CB and mostly blue circle CB, never the red circle CB.
Sometimes on a full ball hit (straight it or close to it) the CB would hop you can hear it land on the slate, if it would make contact with the OB where there was a chalk dot on the CB the CB would bite the OB and climb up on it 1/4" and drop down on the slate, you ight still make the ball but lose the english on the CB. Again this is because of chalk marks on the CB from previous shots-happens in snooker often on that super fast cloth in the UK and 2 1/16" balls that are lite.
Some days it would be worse than others, we played 4-5 days a week for 2 years. Was always a problem. i'd polish the balls every 20-30 hours of play and vacuum the table everyday. When I kept up on it like that-we didnt have many problems. I think its the fast cloth these days, the old cloth had "Fuzz" on it to wipe the balls clean back i the day.
I dont have those problems near as often in LA as I did vegas , I mention Cottons name cause he has played 45 years and i know you know him and respect his opinion, since you dont know me. I'm just sharing what we saw together and conclusions we came up with.
keeping everything clean as possible helps the most, as far as new vs used cloth. was about the same. the first 2 weeks with new cloth there are very few problems-i attribute that to it being clean,
I had a pool room at my house that got 30-70hours a week in play 52 weeks/yr. it was a good set up, i didnt play that much but there was always a champion there playing on it. Or Cotton and me or someone else, it was great. So it go almost the amount of use the front table would at a poolroom, no bangers allowed. So the table was only played on by players and never mistreated, i'm the only one who cleaned it-no maid screwing things up etc. I have noticed in LA new cloth also dosnet have the problems the first couple weeks, after 50 hours of use then the skids showed up, but much less often than dry vegas .
thats what we came up with,