Some people play snooker with one cue, all their lives. It is not necessary to change your cue once you find one that you are comfortable with.

Peter Ebdon has been quoted as saying that he tried over a hundred cues before he settled with the one that he uses today. The cue that Peter uses looks like a pretty ordinary machine spliced cue with a couple of minor alterations. The butt has been lengthened and he has had a mini extension thread inserted into the end of it, if there are other alterations such as weight or reshaping of the taper, these modifications are not easy to see on television.

The point that I am making is that the cue that Peter Ebdon uses is not remarkable from a collecting point of view but it does the job, for him.

I remember when I first started collecting; many people told me that if I was lucky enough to get a Burwat Champion, it would revolutionise my game. When I did indeed get my first Burwat, it was a fairly ordinary cue to play with; in fact, it was a little too whippy to play well.

You might be thinking, that if only you could get such and such a cue, you would improve your game by two or three blacks. In my experience, this rarely happens with a specific model of cue but when you try a different cue as an experiment and things, just click into place.

I remember hearing a story about two players, who had been using the same cue for many years. By this, I mean that they each had their own cue. One night as an experiment, they swapped cues and both played the session of their lives. After the evenings play, they decided to permanently keep the cues that they had just used and are still using them today.

Collecting old cues has little to do with the playability of the cues in question, in fact many cues that have remained in good condition have done so just because they have been so little used. Some of my best collectable cues would be a serious liability, if I tried to use them in competition.

For each player the factors of tip size, weight, balance and thickness of the butt are specific to the person that intends to use the cue, however from a collecting point of view, we like the cue to be as original as possible.

David Smith