We talked about sightright in our PM so here is what I was going to say.
Set up this experiment. Put a ball on the second diamond on the long rail about an inch from the rail on the footside of the table. Now put the cueball on the spot on the headside of the table. Now lay a spare cue down on the table and put its tip at the center of the ghostball of where you would aim to make the shot. Now place a cueball at the exact center of the butt of the cue.
So now go through your normal PSR and get down on the shot. When its time to shoot I want you to perform your stroke in slow motion but follow through above the cueball and follow through far. Now look at where the end of the cue that is past the cueball is in relation to the cue on the table. Is it perfectly overlapping?
For me the cue would not be perfectly overlapping. It would be aiming to miss the ghost ball by a quite a large margin. This is a shot I could make but I would have to warm up every single day on this shot and I would hit it into the rail on the first few attempts for the day then become fairly consistent on it. However, on some days I couldn't hit it consistently at all.
What was happening was my brain knew subconciously that I wasnt lined correctly and would move the cue onto the correct line during the forward stroke. And of course it took my brain a few shots at it each day to calibrate the timing needed for this. Obviously this is bad and it created many inconsistencies.
Now here comes sightright. When I perform the sightright step even though there is a little bouncing (or what bbb would call zigzagging) of the shot picture I still get lined up much closer to dead straight on the line to the ghostball (in this case the spare cue) than I would if I went down with my conventional drop when using sightright.
For me at least the results of this experiment with a conventional drop vs sightright is night and day. At the end of my long experimental follow through the cue tip is probably half an inch off the shot line with the conventional alignment. With sightright alignment it is probably off the line by less than half a cm. To me this is proof that for me at least the sightright alignment method is superior and I will stick with using it.
And as I stated in another thread the results for me have been fabulous. I can now play on a 4 1/8th inch 9 foot diamond and missing shots that a good player is expected to make is not the issue that holds me back any longer.
I will admit that I have also improved my stroke but I will say that without getting the cue to be properly on the shotline (which only sightright was successful at accomplishing) I could have worked on my stroke forever and never would have gotten good results.
The reason I never could have gotten good results with major stroke work was I was cueing across the shotline and relying on hand eye coordination to fix my terrible alignment. Hence some days when my hand eye coordination was good I could shoot consistently but on days when it was off it was not pretty.
Now even on bad days when I get poor sleep I can still pocket balls almost just as good as days when I've slept well and my hand eye coordination is good. Of course on these bad days I still have really poor cueball control but at least I can pocket balls consistently.
And for those people who say I just needed instruction to fix this flaw I have been to a PBIA master instructor (who will remain anonymous and it was not Randy or Scott Lee) and he pointed out this flaw and said I was moving my muscle and steering the cue. His solution was for me to "stop moving that muscle." I tried and tried and couldn't stop moving that muscle my brain just wanted to do it and eventually I gave up and worked on other things. At that point I didn't know if the instructor was right or wrong about moving the muscle and steering the tip but I did know from videos that a lot of the time my stroke did not look straight and I had no clue how to fix it.
Now along comes sightright and after playing around with it for a relatively short time I was able to diagnose and fix the problem.
I will admit every day before I start playing I warm up by placing the sightright on the table and practice the sightright step into it and take a stroke without a single practice stroke (I dont take any practice strokes when playing BTW, just two small feathers and shoot, I always felt practice strokes gave more time for pressure to build up during tough situations and that my delivery was adversely affected because of it.) for each time I line up on the ball. I do this for about 2 to 3 minutes. The first few sightright step attempts I normally dont make it onto the shot line perfectly but after a couple tries I'm pretty much dead on the line and my stroke looks really straight.
Before sightright I had a whole routine of shots I had to shoot which were designed to help dial in the hand eye coordination for the day needed to fix the tip steer flaw. This took about 25 minutes to run through. Without doing this whole routine my odds of a good shoot day greatly diminished.
With sightright I warm up for about 5 minutes. About 2-3 minutes practicing lineing up on the sightright and then another 2-3 minutes hitting straight in shots. After this I am warmed up and my results are still much better than that I would get from 25 minutes of messing around with those benchmark shots which I always missed horribly on the first try or two.
Now if sightright could only make me stay asleep...
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