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Common Mistakes - Too Tight

Common Mistakes - Too TightThese two photos show us a rear view and side view of a grip that’s too tight. Both photos exaggerate the problem—look at the veins popping out of the hand—yet resemble the grips that many players employ. A grip this tight would make good pool very difficult, if not impossible, for several reasons. 1) Squeezing the cue tenses the hand enough to move all the motion into the arm, thus killing the stroke’s acceleration and any cue-ball action that would proceed from that acceleration. 2) When we tense up the hand we make it too easy to move the cue off the line of the shot, and so we miss more shots. 3) Although I’m no anatomist, I believe that tension in the wrist and hand make it impossible to transmit all of the complex neural information we send to the fingers to manage all of the extremely sensitive changes that occur from shot to shot. In other words we lose our feel.