Cue sports, equipment and the betting line
Cues, tips, chalk, cases and racks: weight, taper, ferrule and wrap, and what each of them changes at the table.
A cue is a short list of choices — weight, tip, shaft, joint, wrap — and almost all of the advice attached to them is somebody repeating what they were told when they bought their own. The Cue Rack is the Journal’s attempt to say what each of those choices actually changes at the table, and what it does not change, before the catalogue pages further down show what the trade sells.
Walk into any pool supply shop and you'll find playing cues between 17 and 21 ounces. Nineteen sits dead centre in that spread and it is the most common weight chosen by players at every skill level. Nineteen-ounce cues dominate the shelves.
Listed in the order the section reads: journal first, then features, answers, equipment notes and catalogue indexes.
Two of those choices carry more weight than the rest, and both get a piece of their own here. Cue weight is the number every beginner is handed and the one that matters least once a stroke settles; tip hardness is the number nobody mentions and the one that changes how the ball leaves the cue. Read them in that order and the rest of the rack — shafts, joints, cases, the accessories that live in the pocket of one — stops looking like a wall of specifications.
Below the journal pieces are the shop’s own pages: cue brands it carried, cases, tips and the repair and lathe work it did on site. They are kept because a cue is one of the few pieces of game-room equipment that gets repaired rather than replaced, and because the services page is the clearest surviving record of what that work involves. The prices on those pages are the shop’s, from the day the archive was taken.