How this site decides what to tell you
Most gear sites describe a testing process they did not follow. This page describes the one that actually happens, including the parts that are less impressive than the alternative.
Who writes this
Every word on My Pool Cue is written by one person, Shmulik Dorinbaum. I am an amateur pool and snooker player with more than fifteen years at the table, and I have played in amateur competition. There is no editorial team behind that name and no rotating cast of freelancers. When a page is good, that is me. When a page is wrong, that is also me, and the contact address below works.
The technique, rules and maintenance guides
These I claim fully. How to bridge, how to break, how to jump legally, how to install a tip, how to level a table, what the rules actually say: all of it comes from playing the game for fifteen years, including a good number of things I got wrong for years before somebody corrected me.
Where something is preference rather than fact, the page says so. Players disagree about open versus closed bridges, about glove versus no glove, and about how much a tip really changes your game. Anywhere the honest answer is "it depends", you get the dependency instead of a verdict.
How the buying guides work
Here is the part most gear sites are dishonest about. I have not personally owned or played every cue recommended on this site. Nobody has. A site claiming months of table time with every cue in a fifteen-cue roundup is describing something that did not happen.
What the picks are actually built from:
- The manufacturer's full specification, read rather than paraphrased from another blog.
- Owner reports gathered at volume from marketplaces and player forums, weighted towards what people complain about after a season rather than in the first week.
- Comparison against everything else in the same price bracket, because a cue is only good or bad relative to what else your money buys.
- My own experience of the game, which tells me what matters in a cue and what is marketing, applied to the above.
Ranking is by price and by who the cue suits, never by commission.
How the money works
Product links carry an Amazon affiliate tag. If you buy through one, this site earns a small commission and your price is identical. That is the entire business model. No manufacturer has paid for a placement, a ranking or a mention, and no brand sees a page before it goes live.
A correction that already happened
In August 2026 this site was audited against its own standards and failed. The buying guides carried first-person anecdotes that had not happened: cues bought for specific relatives, sessions at named friends' pool halls, cues borrowed from leaguemates. Around ninety such claims were removed and rewritten as what they actually are, research plus a player's judgement.
It is written here rather than quietly buried, because a standards page that only lists virtues is not a standards page. If you find something else that does not hold up, tell me and it gets fixed or removed, not softened.
Questions people actually ask
Shmulik Dorinbaum
15+ Years Playing Pool & Snooker · Independent, Reader-Funded · No Sponsored Placements
An amateur pool and snooker player with more than fifteen years at the table. My Pool Cue is where that time gets written down: how to actually play the shots, how to look after a cue, and which gear is worth your money once you read past the marketing.