First off, please bear in mind that it is an unwritten requirement to have at least one hundred posts here before you start posting. Intelligent posts require at least five hundred posts before you can post them!
About tip size, the vast majority of players aim with the center of their shaft, never mind what part of their tip is hitting the cue ball. As a result, most people do hit more accurately with a smaller tip. Too, the smaller shaft might be similar to smaller sights on a firearm. Assuming you can see them clearly, you can shoot more accurately with small precise sights than with big coarse sights.
Once you have been here longer you will realize we have about a half-dozen debates we have flogged to death long ago but we still drag them out for one more lap around the block now and then!
I have seen time of hit mentioned countless times, or seemingly countless times. Not once have I seen the results of quality of hit testing. What is the slip factor for various chalks, tips, tip shapes, and shafts? If all tips we play with all grab with less than ten percent slippage at some point in the stroke, then most of the things we are discussing don't matter a whole lot, we learn how to play with our favorite tip. Now suppose that the slip factor is more like fifty percent at the minimum rate of slippage for a tip. Now quality of hit and the time a tip stays on a cue ball matters a great deal more. I have seen testing comparing different components, I haven't seen any absolute tests. With no testing of this sort, we are all whistling in the wind. When we don't know things like slippage, we can't possibly calculate if 50% more time of contact between a tip and cue ball means anything or not.
Ultimately we go with whomever has the most credentials or who presents the best arguments in discussion. Years ago I clearly won a technical discussion. A week or two later I discovered that despite my brilliant debating abilities,(grin) I was wrong! I spent days trying to convince people I was wrong the first time and some never believed it!
These technical debates tend to leave out enough variables that we are all guessing or basing our beliefs on real world testing. One of the things I did in R&D was set up testing in the lab. Never once did calculations trump what happened in the lab!
Among other things you have to be more than a little obsessed to perform at the level Florian does. If he says soft tips spin more I would take it to the bank that for him they do.
Oh yeah, welcome to the forums if I haven't said that already. Anyone that can discuss things without resorting to fighting is always welcome, doesn't matter if they have a few posts or tens of thousands like some here. Not poking a finger at anyone in this discussion but some people that have been doing something for twenty years have twenty years of experience. Others have one year of experience repeated twenty times like a coworker I once had. Twenty years on the job and he still made rookie mistakes.
Come in, play nice, Welcome!!
Hu
Hi Hu and thank you for the informative response. I was unaware of the posting requirements so I will try to limit my first 500 posts to 'I could beat you blindfolded', 'back in my day the cue ball was made of rock, new players have it so easy', and the ever popular 'you suck hurhurhurhur'. My apologies for the breach in forum etiquette :grin:
What would lead you to believe that significant slippage is a thing? Particularly for shots at any speed at all, it seems to me that as soon as slippage starts to occur it results in a miscue, so you have either have essentially no slippage, or you have a miscue, but not much in between. Curious to hear why you believe that two round high speed (in relation to each other) objects colliding with each other (and with one of them being extremely hard and smooth) would have significant slippage (you even mention 50% slippage) that doesn't result in a miscue?
I believe that Hu was throwing that 50% number out as an extreme example to bring a point across as part of an intelligent debate...he is allowed as he has over 500 posts.
Now tip slippage is a very interesting point to consider and Hu makes some very valid points. I am of the opinion that the time of contact between tip and cue is measured in fractions of a second...I have no hard evidence of this, just my basic understanding of the physics of colliding objects coupled with a few decades of pool experience. If someone would like to send me a 4000 frame per second video camera, I will gladly conduct the exercise to prove this out.
There will always be some loss of energy between two colliding objects, especially when one of them is smooth and round. The great equalizer here is chalk. This minimizes the loss...'slippage' as we are calling it here. A chalked tip transfers more of its energy to the cue ball which I hope we can all agree on. If you doubt this, wipe off all the chalk and try an extreme draw shot...let me know how that goes.
Since there is a layer of chalk between the tip and the cue, tip softness *should* have
minimal impact on the amount of energy transferred
UNLESS it is being struck hard enough to cause the tip to significantly deform, thus increasing the contact patch between tip and cue. Note that I said 'minimal' and not 'none'.
I would say that the reason Florian prefers a soft tip is because the majority of his shots ARE hit hard enough to cause this deformation, thus transferring more spin
however for those of us trying to pocket balls instead of launching them off a table in a stunt shot, we should almost never be hitting this hard. Frankly, if you do, you really should focus more on playing better position...I consider myself to be something of an expert on this phenomenon, and will gladly offer evidence if needed.
Anyway, this brings my back around to my original statement that the tip shape and size is far more relevant than tip firmness.
I realize that this is a lot of that 'pesky' science stuff for some people so I will end with the following statement: I can draw a hell of a lot more with an 11.5mm tip than I can with my usual 12.5 which supports this theory. I sacrifice control however so I have settled on 12.5 as what works for me, giving the best combination of both cue ball action and control.
However, even more important than all of the above is the ability to deliver a smooth, confident stroke. That is the magic of shooting pool...the stroke. The evidence to support this theory is all over this thread. We have people who shoot with super-soft to super hard tips, from flat to dime shaped...and all shoot well enough to be posting on a billiards forum. This should clue all of us in that ALL of the above offerings work. In the end, it comes down to whatever gives you the confidence needed to improve your stroke.
Dammit Hu, I have done it again and for that I apologize. In recompense I offer this off-topic and vaguely demeaning image for the 'Earth is flat' crowd.
Thank you, NASA.