Tonight I played with my Schon for the first time since it was shipped back from Seattle. Before tonight I'd been continuing to play with my Predator since I'd been doing so well with it during my "good cue's" absence.

My game fell apart. I don't really understand it, since I did play fairly well in Seattle with the Schon, but tonight I overhit everything and missed most halfway tough shots.

The weight on the cues is the same, but the Predator's balance point is a couple of inches closer to the butt (he he, I said butt) than the one on the Schon. Apparently this is enough to make a huge difference with certain stroke styles, because when I started shooting with my Predator again everything fell back into place.

For further expermentation I played an APA race to 7, Schon Me against Predator Me. While the results of one race are certainly not conclusive, they can still be pretty informative (or damning) at times.

Predator Me: 7 games, 2 safeties - .714 innings/game
Schon Me: 1 game, 3 safeties - 4.0 innings/game

That's better than four times as good playing with the Predator, and it doesn't even take into account how much more relaxed I was with that cue. It's amazing how much easier the game becomes when confidence is on your side.

So anyway, for now at least, I've decided to practice my non-banks games with the Predator. My banks game still seems to like the Schon.

Of course, if the pattern holds true, all this will change before too long as my newfound shooting style stops working and I migrate to something else.