For the most proctection I like GTF cases. Johnnyz86 makes a good point though any hard case and in most circumstances even soft case provide adaquate protection. How often does a cue get damaged while in a case. Have you ever heard someone say I should have spent that extra $ on a case and my cue would not have been damaged?
Yes its true that most cases provide some level of protection but "adequate" is dependent on what you are protecting against.
Want to protect your cue against dings and cracks from external impact? Well then a soft case is not going to offer much protection here.
And actually yes, in the 18 years I have been doing this I have seen many folks who have come to the booth with their stories of cues being damaged as a result of having the wrong case.
Just yesterday I had a collector tell me that one of the foam core dealer cases scratched his Gina cue "all to hell".
A prominent player in the Carolinas, Frank Tullos, after dismissing my pitch about the case needing to be padded to prevent the cue from accidentally coming out of the case, walked out of the pool room and slung his it's george case over his shoulder and watched in horror as his cues splattered all over the asphalt. This put a healthy set of dings in his one-of-a-kind Pechauer.
I myself put a unique Joss into a Whitten knockoff and the bottom fell out and the cue slid through a ring of nails while coming out of the case.
One year at Valley Forge I stood and watched as a player tipped his case up to get the parts to come out a little bit and didn't catch it just right and all of his cues clattered on the floor. This player was sponsored by Jerry Olivier and had just a few minutes before received a high end Olivier.
I have seen too many cues to count that were scratched and otherwise damaged inside the case.
One thing that happens which people don't even realize is stress cracks.
When a case is built in such a way as to allow the butt to rattle against the walls of the cavity or against each other then what happens is that this constant banging can cause the cue to develop fractures at the joints, particularly the A-joint right above the wrap. This can mean that the cue develops a buzz or that the finish begins to crack in that spot.
What do you think is happening every time you hit a bump when you are driving down the road? Your cue is bouncing inside the case and your case is bouncing against whatever is on top of it or it's on top of.
So if this slender 29" piece of wood held together by glue, screws, and a prayer by the cue maker means anything to you then it's worth protecting right?
People pack instruments in molded, fitted, and padded cases in all endeavors besides pool. Only in pool does it seem as if it's all right to just throw your cue into whatever happens to be long enough and hope that it protects your cue.
Pool is the only sport I have seen where people care less about how well the case protects the playing instrument and more about how good the case looks. It's very strange to me.
When I bought my first Porper case I was truly impressed by the seemingly form fit of the tapered cavity. That was the selling point above all else, my cue was NOT going to move. Little did I know that the cue would also get wedged in the case and hard to remove. But the point was that it was protected in a way that I felt a cue should be protected.
When I got my first original Flowers case I "assumed" that it would have the same level of protection and it didn't. It was way prettier than the Porper though and made me feel a lot better walking into the poolroom. But when my $1400 Schon fell out of the case when it was knocked off the table and got broken I was not in love anymore with my pretty cue case.
So since then it has been my mantra to focus on the protection first and go above just adequate into superior so that the person who owns one of my cases has just a little more insurance against the stupid things that we do to ourselves and the accidental things that just happen.
With all that we invest in our cues I would think we would want to know that our cases are more than just adequate.
