Do you really need an expensive cue to play well

The short answer is no.

However, as in Dan’s case, if you’re playing with a nasty bar stick with a bad tip, low mass, poor weight balance and floppy shaft (matron!), you will definitely benefit from using a better cue.

I’m in a position through work where I get to do quality control on lots of cues, many approaching the £1k mark, which naturally involves testing them properly on the table. Mega stiff shafts, lovely weight balance, titanium/stainless ferrules, fancy tips, all that good stuff. I haven’t played with a single cue that feels markedly ‘better’ than my old machine-spliced £80 cue that I’ve had for 20 odd years. Its equivalent goes for about £150 these days, but still, you get the point.

The jump in quality from that nasty £20 bar stick up to a £100-150 quid cue is the biggest and most tangible. The jump from a £150 quid cue to a £900 cue isn’t nearly as big. After a point, the majority of cost is down to labour and material cost/value - creating lovely-looking splices with exotic woods, fancy veneers, that sort of thing. And it’s down to the rarity and desirability of the rare pieces of ash that are going to produce a cue with those distinct chevrons/arrows in the grain all the way up the shaft. A batch of say 100 pieces of ash, that will all go on to become good cues, might only contain two or three pieces that are earmarked for their stiffness and their aesthetically perfect grain arrows. These are the ones that tend to go for big money.

It’s like a lot of things - the law of diminishing returns. If you’ve got a healthy budget and you’re into ‘lovely bits of wood’ (ooh errr!), there’s nothing wrong with paying thousands for a John Parris or whatever. But you’ll never get around the cost of labour in making a beautifully spliced butt and the value/demand for those special bits of ash.