I think grip is the wrong word to use when describing how to hold a cue stick. When I hear the word grip, I imagine squeezing something with my hand. This is exactly what we don’t want to be doing when we hold the cue stick.
I’m sure we have all heard at one time or another to hold the cue stick loosely, and we all think we are doing that. We can make most of the easy shots we take so our grip doesn’t seem to be much of a problem.
The thing is though that I have never seen an amateur player that didn’t have a problem with their grip! They just didn’t realize it.
The secret to a professional class grip is that it does nothing throughout the stroke. There is no clenching, twisting, squeezing, grabbing, or snapping of your grip hand when you swing the cue stick! This little extra oomph that you put in to the cue ball causes you to miss longer shots, causes your cue ball to run long in the speed department, and frustrates you to no end when you miss a shot you are supposed to make.
To understand the feeling that this smooth, no clenching, grip feels like take some pennies and stand about 10 feet from a wall. Now gently toss the pennies toward the wall, trying to get the penny to land as close as possible to the wall. What you will find is that after a while, your hand is relaxed and you are developing this smooth underhand throwing motion without much tension in your hand. This is the feeling your hand should have when swinging at the cue ball.
Now once you have that feeling, pick up your cue stick and set up a shot that you have difficulty with. What I want you to do next is to aim at the shot as you normally do, but once you get to your set position, squeeze your grip hand as tight as you can for 30 seconds or so. Really squeeze hard. When your hand is really tired, let go of all the tension. You should feel a warm, relaxed feeling in your grip hand.
Now take the shot that is causing you trouble. I think you will find that you will start making the shot a lot more regularly with this warm, relaxed hand.
We don’t want to do this squeezing thing before every shot, but these two exercises will help you develop the feeling for having your hand do nothing during the stroke. In fact, it probably doesn’t matter how you start holding the cue stick during a shot. What I think matters more is that the tension in your hand at the end of the stroke is the same as the tension in your hand at the beginning of the stroke.
The short version of this article is that your hand does nothing on the stroke; no clenching, punching, twisting, grabbing, steering, rolling or grabbing!
See you on the road.