Aiming

A good place to post this link would be in the aiming forum.

Thank you for posting this Bob, looks like an interesting read.

Aiming article?

I read the bulk of the information on Billiards and snooker. It's not an easy read......too much ineffective jargon and quite frankly, none of the articles address the real variables that influence aiming at the advanced level.

I can see why this manuscript has not been well circulated among the billiard community.

Bob Callahan said:

Yeah, I know we all dread to see that word in a thread title, but now that the contention has died down it might be a good time to post a link to the only scientific paper I know of that has studied aiming in our sport: "The Perceptual-Motor Characteristics of Elite Performers in Aiming Sports". It's about vision, pattern finding, etc.

Link:

https://secure.ausport.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/197637/AB1992perceptual.pdf

Click to expand...

It is good read, did the author take into account other variables that effect aim such as cue deflection, throw, spin throw, swerve, and more importantly where to aim for a give shot, which is the differentiation between skilled and beginner.

I read it and the author makes it clear that there may be other factors that separate the amateurs from the pros. They were only testing for two things, visual acuity and pattern recognition.

Visual acuity over a span of novice, intermediate and professional level players to determine if the better players had any sort of physical superiority over the lesser skilled players. The answer was that no group had better eyesight than any other group.

For pattern recognition the expert players were able to recognize patterns from actual game situations far better than the novices but were not much better than novices when it came to recognizing images of ball placements which were not from actual game situations. This echoed a similar experiment with chess players with similar results.

The conclusion was that the expert players are simply able to recognize the situation and know the proper course of action better than novices and intermediate players. So the conclusion is that aiming is not so much a fine motor skill as it is more of an outgrowth of knowing which shots follow other shots to be the most consistent in play.

In other words if you have a keenly developed sense of what the right shot is then you also see the right shot on the next one and the next one and in groups of right shots and so on. Having that skill allows you to drop into the right line over and over as you are playing patterns rather than individual shots.

That's what I got out of it.

There were a few other interesting findings in this series of studies with small sample sizes.

No significant differences in ocular dominance were found among all three groups. This suggests that how one uses their ocular dominance is important.

Pattern recognition for experts and for intermediate players was not realistically different. This suggests that players who have arrived at the intermediate stage of development think like experts. When we watch the pros play they don’t really think that much different than the rest of us. They simply play better! When you know how to play the approach to running out is usually obvious for anyone who plays. This is not to include shots like Efren’s “Z” shot. The magician is probably well named and few people think like he does.

My summary of the article:

They divided the groups into three categories, expert, intermediate, and novice. As suspected, no significant differences in eyesight among the three groups. The differences were as follows:

Expert: able to deliver the cue straighter than the other two groups, and went as you expected with novices as the bottom.

Able to control the speed of the cb better, able to control the speed of the ob a little better than intermediates, both a ways better than the novices.

Experts better at defining patterns and recognizing known shots.

Experts better at choosing the correct shot for the situation.


Essentially, no surprises. I do disagree with what they said needs more instruction because of the lack of it, but they were talking about snooker, not American pool. Here, the stroke is stressed, then when you have shown improvement with that, speed control, and then pattern play. Same things instructors here teach. So, I guess I didn't see any new and surprising results from their tests. Cool that someone did them though.

Pretty informative article.....

Bob Callahan said:

Yeah, I know we all dread to see that word in a thread title, but now that the contention has died down it might be a good time to post a link to the only scientific paper I know of that has studied aiming in our sport: "The Perceptual-Motor Characteristics of Elite Performers in Aiming Sports". It's about vision, pattern finding, etc.

Link:

https://secure.ausport.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0006/197637/AB1992perceptual.pdf

Click to expand...

I read the whole thing. What I got from it is that they are saying that pretty much everyone can see the same. They can all see the things in the vision tests without too much difference from one player to another.

Towards the end they say the biggest difference is the other things like English that seperates the better players from the poorer players.

The bottom line is there are alot of optical illusions that happen when we look at a pool shot that force the non dominant eye to try to work like the dominant one. Unless they had these types of actual shots set up on a table the results would be kind of misleading in regards to this.

From what I have learned with finding so many dominant eyes and learning as I went for 4 years, there is a big difference between the poor player and the good player in reference to how far off the dominant eye is in regards to the non dominant eye position.

What really liked about the article is the fact that they say that most people see the same. Or just as good as the next.

It is the optical illusions that hinder or keep a player from improving from the level that they have been at for a long time.

Once a player has been shown or taught how to keep the dominant eye in the dominant position and the non dominant eye from becoming dominant, everyone can aim as good as anyone else.

Of course a player must practice the aiming. But the position of the eyes is really huge.

I'm not just guessing on this. I see it over and over almost everyday and I'm just trying to share this info.

For what it's worth.........