Where in the world is Patrick Johnson? I know this is a thread that has him wringing his hands in pain.
I have a theory about people who play with traditional maple shafts and that is that they use less English than those who use LD shafts.
Secondly, if you notice really good players who play with traditional maple shafts, they almost always have "tuned" their shafts by having them turned down (sanded) and thereby reduced the amount of cueball squirt.
John Schmidt, when he won the U.S. Open 9 Ball Championship had a shaft who ferrule diameter was 12.0 and yes, it was a traditional maple shaft/cue made by Bobby Hunter.
Most of the European players seem to favor LD shafts. MANY elite American players play with LD shafts.
Ok, I didn't say much about random or generic players but I will now.
I kept my son away from pool for most of his life because I wanted him to get an education and a good job. After that was all done, I had been working on my pool game. My son started playing pool with me at pool tournaments and his first cue was a traditional maple shaft and cue because it was cheap and there was no reason for him to invest more money into something that he might never take an interest in.
Along came Steve Titus, one of the inventors of Predator Cues. Steve spent a few weeks hanging out in my neighborhood and at the time he was building LD DymondWood cues. He gave me an opportunity to play with his LD cues and I noticed that they played similar to other LD shaft except that they were even stiffer than most LD shafts. I liked them right away. During that one month, I learned a lot about LD cues. I bought one of the two cues that Steve had left as he only made approximately 7 prototypes. He sold another one to another local guy and left town. We stayed in touch for a while but fell off my radar screen. Hope he is doing well.
Anyway, I fell in love with the way his DW cues played and one day, my son who never practices asked me if he could hit some balls with my Titus cue. Keep in mind, at that time, my son did not have ANY knowledge of squirt, swerve, English or any of the finer points of pool and had only a basic understanding of fundamentals. I gave it to him to play with and he returned about 30 minutes later, and said, "Dad, this cue sticks makes the cue ball go where you want it to go." It was then that I realized that this LD cue made a very positive difference with a relatively new person to the game. Since Steve decided that he would no longer make cues I decided to try my hand at designing LD cues made of DymondWood. It took 2 years of experimenting with building the cues to get to this point and I only have about 3-4 cues built per year. I know now why Steve didn't want to go back into building LD DymondWood cues. Lol
So yes, I am positive that my son received some immediate benefit from playing with a LD cue. He now owns the most gaudy DW cue you have ever seen. One day I will post a photo of his Performance Cue.
JoeyA
Let's say for the sake of argument that we rank three shafts from lowest to highest deflection (I'm not saying necessarily that this is the case, just for the sake of argument).
1) Predator Z
2) OB-2
3) Lucasi Zero Flex
Will a random or generic player perform BETTER with the lower deflection shaft?
I have to think that whatever amount of deflection your shaft causes, it's always a matter of learning to adjust to your shaft, regardless of the how much deflection there is. It seems to me that elevating your game is much more a matter of learning to adjust to the deflection.
For instance, the Predator Z series is hugely popular in my area among amateurs. However, I see very few professionals playing the Z shaft.
So at the end of the day, provided you're playing with some kind of low-deflection tech shaft (ie. any of the above brands, and then some), objectively speaking, does it really matter?
