Left handed chalk - for left eye dominant players
- By SmoothStroke
- Main Forum
- 58 Replies
PATCHINGFor those of you who are left eye dominant and play right handed…read on. There is hope.
I’ll start with “WHY”. My Fargo rating has dropped from 603 to 587 in the past year despite my exhaustive increase in practicing. I recently met with an eye doctor and explained that the balls look dark and blurry at the other end of the table. I said I want to be able to see like a could 30 years ago. After checking everything out, he said, it’s not your eyes.
So I started researching “AIMING” Thinking it has to be an aiming problem. I landed on the topic of eye dominance which led me to “center vision” topic, and I realized that I am left eye dominant and I play right handed…so I suspected that I was not putting my eyes over the cue correctly.
Now that I have corrected my stance, I can see the balls clear and I now have “tone” when I’m down on a shot. It’s a lock. I’m back! Haven’t had that in years.
The problem: I find that it’s very awkward to get my head over the cue correctly, it feels like I have to stretch my neck uncomfortably to get my head across the cue, and I can feel it pulling on muscles in my neck and on my right side of my abdomen. I see why I “default” to bad posture/head eye alignment because it’s so uncomfortable to get in correct position. I can see that I’m going to have to make conscious effort to check myself on every shot that I’m in alignment…so I needed to somehow work it into my pre-shot routine to try to remind myself, so I have named the chalk “left handed chalk”.
Now, before every shot, I grab some left handed chalk, and the chalk reminds me of my need for alignment, this also means that I now chalk before EVERY shot. WIN-WIN.
I feel like being left eye dominant and playing right handed is a disadvantage, It’s an un-natural posture. I haven’t had “tone” on cut shots it seems, for years. It feels great to be able to see the balls again. If this can help someone struggling with the same thing, then it was worth posting. Just grab you some left-handed chalk and it’s a lock!
Credit to AZ community for threads helping me find “center vision” …something I didn’t even know existed!
If you lose sight in one eye the other eye will claim dominance.
You can always do the Hokey Pokey and put the right eye in or you can try patching and use a right handed chalk.
The muscles that move your eyes are the fastest and strongest muscles in your body.
The eye is capable of many things.
Patching is not only for the young.
Yes, you can change your dominant eye, often by deliberately training your brain to favor the other eye, especially through methods like patching, which forces the weaker eye to work harder, but this is most effective in childhood; changes can also occur naturally with age, injury, or vision loss, though it's more of a gradual shift than a flip-flop. Eye dominance isn't always absolute, with many people having a near-even split, and training can help people with "cross-eye dominance" for tasks like shooting or photography.
How Eye Dominance Can Change
- Training & Patching:
Covering your dominant eye (patching) forces your brain to use the non-dominant eye, strengthening it. This is a core technique for treating amblyopia (lazy eye) in kids but can be used by adults for training.
- Vision Changes:
If your dominant eye experiences vision degradation (like cataracts or injury), your brain may shift its preference to the other eye.
- Age:
Eye dominance can subtly shift as you get older, often starting around age 45, leading to slight changes in performance for some tasks.
- Task-Specific Shifts:
Your brain might even automatically switch dominance depending on the situation, like when looking in different directions.
- Training & Patching:
- Sports & Hobbies:
Many shooters (archery, firearms) or photographers try to switch dominance to match their handedness, which can improve accuracy.
- Correcting Problems:
For conditions like amblyopia, forcing the brain to use the weaker eye is crucial for long-term vision.
- Sports & Hobbies:
- Testing:
Use the "finger over object" method: focus on a distant object, make a triangle with your hands, then close one eye at a time to see which one maintains focus.
- Training:
Use an eye patch on your dominant eye for short periods during activities, or even try wearing glasses with a frosted lens over your dominant eye, suggest
- Testing:
