John,
The skill needed to successfully jump a ball, with a jump cue,can be learned in 30 minutes by almost any banger out there.
So what? The skill to successfully draw a ball can be learned in five minutes. The skill to kick can be learned in five minutes. Anything can be learned quickly in pool. To master it however takes much much longer.
You are making the same mistake that many anti-cue folks make and are just equating the action with "success". A jump SHOT is not about making the cueball hop over another ball. Doing that is just a result of the right mechanics and the only difference between using a "full" cue and a jump cue is how you hold the cue and the real range.
A successful jump SHOT is one where the shooter has correctly executed the shot with the right speed, spin, trajectory to make the cue ball and object ball do what the shooter wants it to do.
Unless the OB is hanging in the jaws, what is the success ratio of jump shots, other than avoiding BIH or hoping to "luck" into a return safety
Depending on the skill of the player and what they want to do the success ratio can be quite high. Like I said in an earlier post, if you saw me and others around me who are even better, shoot our jump shots and make shots with draw, follow, jump safes, jump banks, jump kicks and basically jump shots that work as well as any normal shots.
If you see a player who has really practiced then you will see a much higher level and perhaps begin to appreciate how well someone can use the jump cue.
I am NOT anti-jumping, I am anti jump cue's.
If you are pro-jump SHOT then how can you not appreciate all the great great great players that have put in the effort to become extremely good at the wider range of jump shots a jump cue provides?
You call it progress, I call it a gimmick that enables a "C" player to stumble out of a trap.
A gimmick that does that is a steel rod with a huge phenolic tip on it. A jump CUE is something that can be used to make a difficult shot with precision. Of course a jump cue allows a C player to stumble out a trap but then again the same C player also stumbles into successful three rail kicks once in a while as well. Maybe the trap should be tighter.
Amongst two evenly matched pro's, its a wash. They can jump 90% of the shots WITHOUT a specially designed cue. If you don't think so, would you play SVB, or Darren, or Alex, if they were not allowed to use a jump cue, and you were ?
No they can't. If you want to back any of those guys in a jump shot contest I will set up 20 jump shots with more than 12" distance between the cueball and the blocking ball. I will bet $10,000 that their percentage of successful shots is less than 50% and my percentage will be at least 50%. Further more I will bet another $10,000 that if I give them a jump cue then their success percentage will be much much higher than mine.
Plain and simply, jump cues are an unnecessary gimmick, and I am surprised that someone of your age, and experience, so avidly defends them.
Dick[/QUOTE]
If they are so unnecessary can you explain why all the pros use them? If all the top pros can jump 90% of the jump shots they are faced with why do they use them?
I mean I have sold jump cues to Fong Pang Chao, who won $50,000 with his on a jump shot that he ABSOLUTELY could not have made with his normal cue. I sold one to Allen Hopkins who jumped the cueball clear off the table when he tried it the first time because he was used to having to hit the cue ball at warp speed to compensate for the soft tip and back heavy cue. I can't tell you the amount of jump cues that pros have acquired from me. For an "unnecessary gimmick" there are an awful lot of pros, I'd guess around 99%, who use them. Seems pretty necessary to me.
Now, the standard comeback is that a person will get one because his opponent has one. This argument, if true, actually speaks to the necessity of jump cues. But actually one can choose to handicap oneself and cut oneself off from a wide range of possible shots and elect to not use a jump cue. A jump cue is not used because the opponent has one, it is used because every time the player steps to the table he or she wants to have the largest range of shots available to them.
