Is the dominant eye important in shooting?

never did anywhere that good and I was shooting with a 12 gauge ou Beretta:grin:

not mine dammit

but the point here is that eye dominance is much more important when TRIANGULATING to calculate the lead required for everything to the right place at the same time.
That is a different situation than shooting at balls on a table.
 
CreeDo said:
... Plenty of players are opposite eye dominant and shoot great. Earl Strickland comes to mind. ...
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You're correct that many players are opposite-eye dominant, but Earl does not appear to be one of them. He is right handed and shoots with his right eye over (or close to over) the cue stick.

John Morra is a good example of a right-handed player with the stick under his left eye.
 
Ray...No, he means 2 eyes. Randy recently had eye surgery, and no longer needs his "pool shooting glasses". Like Randy, I also aim with two eyes...which is normal for most of us.

To answer the OP's question...dominant eye does not play a major role in success on the pool table. Some people will "see" a straight line with the cue under their dominant eye, and others won't. What really matters is whether you can deliver the cue accurately into the straight line that you perceive, regardless of whether it's under your dominant eye or not.

Scott Lee
www.poolknowledge.com

whitewolf said:
You mean 4 eyes.:grin-square:
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Believe me. they are using their dominant eye whether they know it or not.

whitewolf said:
And why is it that so many great players just place the cue between both eyes and don't use a dominant eye?
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Hi there,

I need to find everyones dominant eye that I teach i order to tweak their aim to the best of their ability.

Even though it might appear that the cue is directly between their eye, when you break it down and figure it out they either right eye dominant or left eye dominant.

Players like John Mora and earl totally shoot with one eye like a telescope. Us other mere mortals have the cue between the eyes but favor the dominant eye to different degrees depending on how strong your dominance is.

Your eyes take turns doing the aiming but the dominant eye always has to be in the dominant position to envision the shot the most correctly.

If the dominant eye is not in the dominant position the shot doesn't look very good, but then sometimes it does look good anyway but it's not the correct look and will almost always result in a miss.

Once a person has had this lesson and learns how to use the dominant eye to the best of their ability it's as plain as the nose on your face that this is the way that it is.

But a player can just keep shooting the way they do not knowing and be stuck at the level they are at forever.

One of the biggest reasons there is such drastic differences is aiming abilities is that some players are just better naturally at getting this right. Others get better at it from repetition.

But this is something that can be taught to everyone just as effectively as teaching them to shoot a gun. There is only one spot to be and that is in this dominant position.

Once they learn this there is no telling them that the dominant eye makes no difference. Because they can see it with their own eyes.

Seeing is believing for sure.
 
the catch is when your eyes are weakly dominant

My strong eye is weakly dominant. To make matters worse in some sports I have competed at I needed a strong dominant eye, in others I needed the weak side input maybe even more than the strong side input. There are exercises to strengthen either eye and someone that swaps often should decide which eye is dominant and work on strengthening it.

Back when I worked on such things I coud swap eye dominance at will. Holding a pencil out point up at arm's length and swapping eye dominance back and forth while watching the target twenty feet away seem to jump back and forth was highly educational. Swap eye dominance without knowing it at that distance and you will hugely miss a target!

You will miss very simple pool shots when the same thing happens. Some just off straight shots encourage you to swap eyes for some reason. Frustrated me when I knew I was seeing a super easy shot wrong, then I saw Efren and Bustamonte both miss the same shot which any bar room banger routinely makes. When we just lean over and swat that shot in missing is about 100-1 against. Take your time and lock down and the eyes may well swap.

It doesn't matter which eye is dominant, after awhile it doesn't matter much where the dominant eye is. I shoot a shot fairly often leaning in from the side with both hands over my head and my dominant eye about eighteen inches out of line instead of using a bridge. I don't miss many of these because I have a pretty solid perspective of where the stick and balls are.

Left handed, right handed, left eye dominant, right eye dominant, none of it matters. Truth is that if you can only shoot when you are standing in the perfect position with your eye perfectly located you will never be a competitive pool player. It is great to have a baseline to work with but if you can't shoot from a less than perfect stance, with a less than perfect stroke, and less than perfect eye position you will be spotting your opponent five to ten percent of your shots just at a guess, far more than you can spot a decent player.

You have to learn how a shot looks with everything perfect so you can recognize how it looks when things aren't perfect. With respect to Gene and all instructors, everything perfect is great for beginner drills and people need to learn that for a baseline. However it is only a baseline. Where you go from there will separate the winners from the folks that play great but never quite get there.

Find your dominant eye. Do exercises at home to strengthen it. Don't obsess over it on the pool table. The best way to shark somebody in a pool game is to ask them why they stroke like that, why they hold the stick like that, or which is their dominant eye. Don't shark yourself!!

Hu
 
Eye dominance can be a factor, but it doesn't have to be. Basically, there are two ways of aiming: binocular, with chin centered over the cue (no eye dominance); dominant eye aiming. Both work fine.

Allison Fisher has always been one of pool's best shot makers, and she aims with the binocular method. What one must be aware of, if you use both eyes centered in binocular aiming, you must aim from the cueball to the object ball and ignore where the cue shaft points.

Dominant eye aiming permits you to sight down the shaft, through the cueball, to the object ball. Everything lines up and looks "right", like sighting a rifle.

You think there is a problem with opposite eye dominance? I think the opposite might be true. Willy Mosconi, Mike Sigel and Jim Rempe are all opposite eye shooters. Can you think of three better shotmakers? (Someone wrote Earl was opposite eye dominant. Wrong! That's so far from correct it made me smile.)

Learning to shoot dominant eye if you've been aiming binocular, can be a challenge. I believe it's worth the effort. At least it has been for me. I can relate my experiences and hope it helps you.

I played for over 30 years as a binocular aimer. But I was never a really good long shot shooter. So I decided I'd try dominant eye shooting.

Well, the first problem I encountered was I couldn't make a ball! I had a huge problem trying to aim at all. Finally, I simply closed my non-dominant eye (my left), and tried that. It seemed to work. After spending nearly a whole day at it, I learned to sight with both eyes open, with my dominant eye over the cue. But that didn't solve all. I could make a straight in shot, but had a hellava hard time with cuts.

I had a conversation with the superb teacher, Chan Whit. He suggested I move the cue slightly from directly under my DE toward my nose. He said to move until the shaft no longer appeared to aim at the cueball, then come back. That helped me a lot, and seemed to be my way of aiming. However, I have found that gradually the shaft moved directly under my dominant eye, where I keep it now. I don't know if that is a common path, or something idiocyncratic to my style.

What I started to realize after addressing the aiming conundrum, was aiming was the easy part. Delivering the cue straight is a far more vexing problem for most players. I believe more shots are missed because of improper cue delivery than aiming.

So, I'm not sure, if your goal is to improve your shotmaking, if you can adjust your aiming without taking stock of your stroke mechanics, stance, grip and alignment. It's all a package. If one thing is off, you miss.

Anyway, around this time, I got Max Eberly's Power Pool. I believe Max has put the best instruction on stance and alignment available on DVD. Production values are kind of amateurish, but the information and the quality of coaching is in a class by itself. I highly recommend it.

Armed with Max's stance guidelines, I sought to correct a stance issue that has plagued me since I started: I was too over the cue and my shooting elbow was tucked inside, well off plane. Funny, too, I always thought my stance was pretty good. I had a 14.1 high run of 83, with tons of 50+ runs. So I was a decent player, but compensating for errors.

The dominant eye aiming was comparatively easy to learn. Re-doing one's mechanics, after decades of doing it wrong, was not so easy. But I knew, on the occassions when I would do it right, how powerful it would be to do it right all the time.

And so, for nearly six months, I devoted every lunch hour to training. I'd shoot from the spot to the center diamond, being sure the cueball rebounded straight. This establishes if you can hit the cueball in the center. But my favorite drill is a long straight shot, diagonally across the table. Nothing gives you as much feedback. For me, if I developed a pattern of missing left, I knew my elbow was creeping back to its former place of comfort. This was a very persistent problem and required constant vigilence. But I can say, after hitting this shot a few thousand times, I can usually deliver the cueball dead on, no spin, no cut. When I can do it on a dead stop shot, repeatedly, I do it with draw and follow, and vary the force from soft to as hard as I can shoot it.

Was it worth the effort? God, yes! I wish I did this years ago. The keys are commitment and patience. But the net result is, I shoot better now at 62 than I ever have. Much better!

I can't say enough about Max's DVD. You might also look at Joe Tucker's Third Eye DVD and gadget; it helped some. Also, Gene Albrect's Perfect Aim DVD will help answer a lot of questions. Ironically, I contacted Gene about the time I had solved my own aiming issues. But in conversation with him, I realized he teaches what I learned through trial and error. So don't do like me, reinventing the wheel. Gene's info is excellent.
 
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