I have switched grips numerous times, due to always analyzing what I'm doing and how I might improve on it. This way I experimented a lot, but I never went too extreme into a direction. (like going with a really small area, or going fullscreen fullarea) Always staying at full area and just changing the window size in case I had any problems adapting at first. So I can't say anything about really small tablet areas or grips which resemble writing on a sheet of paper.
What I have experienced is, that those vertical grips allow you more freedom in any direction. Your grip on the other hand probably has problems when going with full area and extending your fingers to a far end corner, you'll most likely loose posture, and thus need to readjust.
Giving more freedom, allows you to tweak other things, which suddenly might seem a lot more important, once you have this "base" of a grip. How your wrist is angled, is your wrist in front of the tablet, or is it on it? If it's in front, can your fingers reach the corners? Do you need to grip higher? These are quite important factors which influence you greatly, almost as important as gripping the thing itself.
Experimenting is key. Every time I switched grips (not from copying other players, but just feeling this new way of trying to aim, and rolling with it for a few weeks, gave me an idea of the advantages and disadvantages or sheer differences compared to other grips. Sometimes you just feel more comfortable, sometimes you feel like dying, but you weirdly enough have better precision. Analyzing what is giving you this precision, and what is actually causing you discomfort is really important, going with the things which ultimately help you, and getting rid of things which discomfort you is going to lead you to your ideal grip.
The general idea I learned from grip to grip, is that finger control is absolutely important. Once you have somewhat of a comfortable grip, and you're used to it, most of the aiming is going to take place in your head. Feeling the movement before you even execute it, that's what you have to get down to be quite consistent. (it's basically building up muscle memory and concentrating enough, with some analyzing here and there)
Things I learned when switching grips
- Using fingers as much as you can grants the most consistency when doing absurd jumps
- Because of 1), finger control is really important, being able to flick quickly and controlled without losing posture.
- playing around with how you angle your wrist is quite important, sometimes you feel like you have an off-day, and one of the possibilities why, is that you have your wrist angled a bit different than usual
- playing around with how high you grip your pen is important too, I always thought the lower you go, the better, because you have more control, but the higher I gripped the pen, the more consistent I got and the more comfortable I felt. (also required me to use my fingers more than my wrist) (this is my experience, don't think it'll be the same for you, just experiment!)
- the more finger control you have, the less need you have to tense up I actually noticed that I tense up because I feel insecure about my aim, feeling as if I wouldn't tense up that much I would perhaps even miss. I still tense up, but that's on 3 minute long fullscreen jumps which I do not practice at all. (I'm looking at you, guitar vs piano aqo training maps!)
Here's another link to something I wrote some time ago which might help you
http://ask.fm/Omgfzor/answer/114475915778 (I'm too lazy to rewrite all that)
And to answer your questions
How do you hold your pen? (pictures appreciated)
Don't have a picture ready, here have this instead
http://ask.fm/Omgfzor/answer/114513548290Why do you hold your pen like that?
Because after experimenting I felt this was great, my old one was without the pinky extended and I used that one for quite some time, but I changed it because my pinky started hurting for no reason on caren_sk-level maps. So I extended it and that's how I'm playing to this day. However, I still change things frequently, like the gripping height, the angle and the window size (basically active area with using full area)
Do you actually like the way you hold the pen or does it bother you?
I like it, after all, I got to this through experimenting and trying out things, it bothered me a bit at the start, because I had ZERO finger control. It was painful, but the good painful which is due to exhaustion, and not due to sheer pain.
What kinda of area do you play on?
Full area
Holy shit, didn't expect this to be such a wall of text. Hope you somehow get what I'm saying and hopefully it'll help you.