So, Tuesday I went back to the pool room with my original shaft to see if things would stay the same. Overall, I don’t think so. I continued my bad habit of overrunning position and strangely enough, there’s a few shots that I have to relearn apparently. These aren’t shots I was missing before, so this is something new. However, some of the shots I was not making before are pretty easy now… so there’s definitely something to this shaft change.
The biggest thing I noticed is that I’ve fallen back into that age-old trap of over-cutting balls while using inside english. With my OBCP shaft (no deflection), I didn’t have that issue. With my original shaft (medium/high deflection), of course I’m going to overcut them. This means, I have to go back and really focus on The Rail Workout, among other things.
I have a Kamuii Black Soft tip on the original (which is a traditional medium hardness) and the Kamuii Black Super-Soft (which is a traditional soft) on the OBCP. I do know that I don’t like the super-soft. It’s just too… spongey, I guess. It spins the hell outta the ball, but honestly I don’t need that much spin, and more often than not, it gets me into trouble. I can still spin the ball with the harder tip, but it’s not out of my control like I sometimes feel with the softer tip. I do know that no matter what I do… I have to stock up on the Kamuii Blacks. I hope their 2nd generation tips haven’t changed how they play, since both of these are 1st gen.
Actually all of this has gotten me thinking about maybe trying to find a happy medium… a 12.75mm shaft with less deflection than my stock shaft. Lucasi makes one, the OB1 and predator 3142 are the options I’m thinking about it. Honestly, the thicker shaft feels better in my bridge, but I’m starting to remember why I wanted to move away from my shaft now. There’s a lot of guess-work involved when dealing with varying deflections (speed, distance, etc). That will always be the case, but there are tools to help manage that. I feel like I’ve tried both ends of the spectrum and now I’m ready for something in the middle. I just wish I didn’t have to fork out another xx amount of dollars for each “test”. :/