Have you ever wondered whether or not you have a dominant eye or how it might affect your pool game? Have you ever checked? Do you know how to check? Many people have never checked and don’t know how to.
The dominant eye is the eye that looks directly at an object, while the non-dominant eye looks at the same object at a slight angle. Understanding and recognizing this concept can aid in correcting potential sighting and aiming flaws. Here is one very basic way to determine your dominant eye:
- Choose a stationery object that’s approximately 10 feet away from you.
- Stare at the object and then point to it with your finger.
- When your eyes are focused on the object and not at your finger, you should see two blurry fingers in your line of sight.
- Now, close one eye. Then, close the other eye.
- Notice that with one of your eyes closed, your finger will point exactly at the object. Now, when the other eye is closed, your finger will point at an area shifted slightly from the object. The eye with which you see your index finger pointing exactly at the object is your “Dominant Eye.”
It’s possible that you may see two fingers and have trouble pointing your finger at an object. In this case, you might not have a dominant eye.
Here’s how this applies to pool…
The diagram shown is an example of how we approach center ball with our eyes. Ideally, we aim for a precise point on the cue ball. In this case, that point is where the two solid lines meet. However, if you have a dominant eye, that eye will sent more information to your brain than the other eye.
If you’re unaware of this, it can cause your cue to align itself parallel with that dominant eye. In our example, the dotted line indicates the visual parallel shift the player has made due to a dominant left eye. As you can see, the contact point has now moved from the actual center of the cue ball to what the dominant eye perceives to be the center of the cue ball.
Still following me?
Obviously, just determining our dominant eye is not enough to improve our pool game. However, when we recognize this fact, we can make the proper adjustments to begin sighting shots correctly. Having a perfect stroke demands we know where the center of the cue ball is. This may require retraining your eyes.
Honestly, there’s not enough room on this page to cover the various ways that we can use this information to fix our sighting and aiming flaws. There is, however, a training aid I was recently introduced to that is a small, simple, yet extremely effective tool to help make this correction. This device is called the 3rd Eye Stroke Trainer.
Created by Joe Tucker, a truly remarkable player, it’s a small plastic extension that slides over the tip of your cue. There are two arms that continue approximately the width of a cue ball. Stroking with the 3rd Eye Trainer demands your sighting and your stroke to correct itself. Periodically using this trainer will dramatically increase your accuracy by retraining your eyes and your brain to find center ball. I personally discovered a slight sighting flaw in my own game and have used it with numerous students in my clinics to identify and correct theirs.
As described by Joe Tucker, if you were aiming for the center of a bullseye and your first group of shots went to the left of the target, you would make an adjustment and aim your next group of shots to the right of the target. This is going against your eyes, but our results indicate that what we believe to be center is clearly not the center. In pool, our results are not so obvious.
The 3rd Eye Stroke Training shows you how to discover these problems and correct them. All the information from this article, and more, can be found at Joe Tucker’s web site. Visit www.JoeTucker.net to view the complete stroke trainer movie, including previews of the “aiming workout” and “racking secrets” DVDs. You can also watch Joe run 114 balls in straight pool. If you’re curious at all about how precise your stroke is, try it out. If nothing else, check out the third movie of the series on his web site for some mind-blowing precision stroke shots!
(Neither Samm Diep nor the editor is in any way profiting from the promotion or sales from this product. Consider this information a public service announcement.)
Samm Diep
http://www.pooltipjar.com/
