Eyes along the rail

By Bob Fancher

The object balls lies about eight inches off the side rail, three feet from the corner pocket. The cue ball lies just below mid-table, right on the (imaginary) line from the head spot to the foot spot. You line up carefully, drop, and take your shot. The object ball hits the top rail, missing the pocket by less than an inch. You cut it too thin.

You know you have done this at least a hundred times, probably a thousand. In fact, you may have done it consistently enough to believe your cue has “too much deflection,” so you’ve bought a new cue.

Early on in my efforts to learn this game, I once pointed out to a pro, who had just made this mistake, how common it is. I pointed out that, in fact, you need to hit the ball maybe a quarter inch fuller than you think whenever you have such a shot. The pro agreed, but said my way of dealing with it-simply hitting the ball fuller than it seemed to require-was wrong. “If a problem is common, it must be the result of a common mistake, most likely with your stance” she said. “You have to find what you are doing wrong and correct it.”

Probably not. Certainly, a common problem probably has a common cause. But if a particular problem is common to many players, with many different stances and styles and levels of learning, the cause probably lies in something other than our manner of play. One thing we all have in common, beyond our differences as pool players, is how human brains work.

Our brains did not evolve to shoot pool. Our brains evolved to help us survive in the natural world. Some brain attributes that help us survive may be less than optimal for shooting pool. Sometimes we do not need to “find what we are doing wrong.” We need to figure out the limitations of our brains and figure out how to work around them.

Pool players have already figured out one neurological limitation, which affects every shot, without realizing what they have discovered.

What do I mean?

Imagine your visual field as a two-dimensional space-a screen. Psychologists have shown that we are more accurate when the object on which we focus is in the lower part of the screen. We are less accurate when focusing on something higher up in the visual field. This makes sense, biologically: Humans face far more threats on the ground than from the air. We can hurt ourselves by ignoring the terrain we traverse, we can bump into objects that break or puncture our bodies, and almost all of our natural predators spend more time on the ground than above our heads. Our favorite rewards occur at or below eye level.

When we are standing at the table, the entire table falls in the lower part of our visual field. If, as every good instructor teaches, we make all our decisions about the shot while standing, we make them using the most accurate part of our visual apparatus.

Once we drop to our shooting position, most of the table-including the object ball-now lies in the top part of the visual field. Any “correction” made from this position is likely to be less accurate than our original decision.

Pool players learned long ago that making “corrections” when you are in the shooting position hurt your shot, and we found the solution. The rules “Make all your decisions while you are standing” and “Never make a correction from your shooting position” let us work around our neurological attributes.

(The same attributes, by the way, probably shed some light on the endless controversy of whether to place your head closer to or further above the cue stick as you shoot. If you shoot from a more upright position, the object ball is in the lower, more accurate part of your visual field. Thus, you probably gain some accuracy in your perception of the object ball, so that your aim is more precise. However, the cue stick and cue ball probably drop too far below the focal point in the visual field for you to keep good track of them, so you lose some visual control over your stroke. The chin strokers (of whom I am one), on the other hand, lose some accuracy in aiming but have a better visual control of the stroke. The controversy will never end, because each choice is a compromise, and individuals will differ on which compromise they prefer.)

Shots along the rail present us with special challenges. The rails present strong visual lines, and not all lines are created visually equal.

Normally, our visual field only takes in a breadth of a few yards, but it takes in distances many times that magnitude. Think of standing in the center of the goal line of a football field, looking straight ahead: You cannot even see the sidelines at the five or ten yard mark, but you can see far past the opposite goal line. Our brains assume, reasonably enough, that lines going up-and-down in the visual field represent greater lengths than lines going from side to side.

Many optical illusions prove this point. Draw two vertical parallel lines one inch long, about an eighth of an inch apart, slanting slightly from left to right. Beside them draw identical horizontal lines. The vertical ones will look longer.

When we shoot along a rail, the rail goes top-to-bottom in our visual field. Thus, we tend to overestimate how far the object ball must travel to intersect the end of the rail-that is, how far it is to the pocket. We make a nice shot that would, in fact, go into the pocket-if the pocket were where we judged it to be. The pocket, in reality, is closer than we thought, so we hit the top rail instead.

In fact, rails present many other visual challenges. For one thing, there are very few parallel lines in nature, and parallel lines (especially vertical ones) wreak havoc with our depth perception. The rail presents us with many strong parallel lines (top edge, shadow, bottom edge, etc.).

No one, to my knowledge, has worked out exactly how the optical illusions caused by vertical parallel lines affects the game of pool-that is not a high priority of research scientists! Two things are certain, though: Problems shooting along rails do not mean you need a new cue, nor do they necessarily reflect problems with your stance or stroke.

The work-around solution to shooting along the rails has two parts: First, aim, don’t calculate. That is, ignore the rail as much as possible; do not calculate where the object ball’s line of travel will intersect the rail, or you will always make the mistake under discussion. Second, accept that the proper aim looks as if the object ball is going to hit the side rail just below the pocket. As another teacher told me, “It’s always fuller than you think.”

Properly aimed, cut shots along the long rail really look as if they are going to come up short. They look as if you are hitting the ball too full. Once you’ve gone through this optical illusion a few thousand times, you stop noticing it-which is good. But you forget that you had to learn to compensate for it years ago, and you give beginners bad advice.

Next time you see a beginner or early intermediate player making this mistake, don’t advise him to change his stance or stroke. Explain to him what I’ve just explained to you. You’ll save the kid a lot of grief-and avoid his resenting you for bad advice.

 

All copyrights are owned by Bob Fancher. No duplication is allowed without his permission.