The real issue isn't the jump cue. It's the use of resin and phenolic tips on jump cues. The advocates for the jump cue seem to preach that the cue doesn't make the shot for them, and that there is some form of skill to executing a jump shot with the modern jump stick. I'm old enough to remember jump/break cues like the first ones made by Falcon and Mace. They had either a Triangle or a Water Buffalo tip on them. There was a range that you could effectively jump the blocking ball - somewhere between 12-18" away, you could jump a full ball. When the Bunjee Jumper came out with the phenolic tip, jumping became too easy. You didn't have to overcome compression of the cue tip. With a playing cue, or the old school leather tipped jump cue, you had to hit the ball hard enough to compress the leather, and then bounce the ball off the slate. With the phenolic tips, the front end of the shaft just gets out of the way, as there is no compression that you need to overcome. What that also does is allows you to stroke the cueball much softer, and still attain airborne status. Now you can spin the ball, or jump masse, because you no longer need the same force on the shot.
Based on the above facts, it is purely the phenolic/resin tip that has allowed jumping to become this so called "skill" that everyone keeps talking about. There are leather tips that are treated to be as hard as the phenolics now. You can also use thin CA super glue to make a tip rock hard. Jump cues have been around since the 90s. We never saw their rampant use until they had the phenolic tips. Once the phenolic tips came out, that magic range of 12-18" became anywhere from 3-24". If making one simple change to a "cue" can result in such a dramatic increase in functionality, it's the equipment, and not the skill of the player.
Get rid of tips with a hardness over 75D on the Rockwell scale, and we'd see a drastic decline in those "skills" people keep mentioning.
Thanks for pinning it all on the Bunjee Jumper. I guess I did my job right if people think the introduction of the Bunjee Jumper brand was what made jumping easier.
Actually the Bunjee was introduced at the VNEA Nationals in 1999. Well after the introduction of jump cues in the 80s and jump rods in the early 90s and phenolic tips in the early 90s. Tom Rossman was running around selling a cue called the Happy Hopper made by Jacoby. I saw him sell about 25 of them in five minutes after a short demonstration. At that time I was selling jump cues in my booth as a favor to Franz Hauber in Germany. I would take 4 or 5 of them over and when people would ask I would hand them one and tell them to go try it. I didn't instruct anyone, I didn't even own one of them.
But when I saw Tom do his thing I realized that there was actually a market for them. So the next year I had 500 of them made in Taiwan and 50 of them went to Franz for his help developing them. 50 went to a friend in Germany. 400 went to the VNEA and BCA Nationals.
I had to learn to use that style of jump cue. I spent several weeks developing a routine that demonstrated shots ranging from very easy to fairly difficult. When I got to the VNEA I quickly found out that I could NOT simply hand a person a jump cue and expect them to jump with it. I had to learn to teach them how to jump.
Yes hard tips make it easier to jump, that's the point. Hard tips, stiffer taper, harder wood and lighter weight all contribute to making the jump shot easier to do. Just like tips+chalk make applying spin easier. So of course this tool was developed to make the act of jumping easier. It went from nearly impossible and very limited to accessible.
Chalk did the exact same thing. Prior to chalk tips did the same thing to a limited degree. Chalk vastly expanded the range of possible shots, it made the application of spin easier. But because chalk was introduced long before any of us were born we simply accept it.
Again, referring to my previous example, just because chalk makes a force draw possible doesn't mean I can do it consistently or at all just because I use chalk.
Yes if you want to go around with a durometer and measure the hardness of everyone's tips then you could reduce the amount of possible shots. Then the players would simply be making shots according to their level of skill and what's possible.
However you are wrong that it's only the tip. As most of us know one can jump with a shaft only and a regular leather tip as close as 1mm. This is because the weight displacement of a shaft being lighter than a cue ball allows for the cueball to move without being trapped. So if you barred hard tips then makers would simply build 40" cues that weigh less than the ball. In fact such cues are currently on the market. They represent a category I call ultra-lights and are more geared towards simply making the ball jump forgoing the control that cues more like the Bunjee Jumper give to the player.
We should reward innovation in this case and not punish it. Either ban jumping altogether or allow jump cues but stop trying to hinder the use of a tool which in fact requires a skill to to use.