21. What is a dominant eye?
Description
This article is from the Pool & Billiards FAQ, by Bob Jewett with numerous contributions by others.
21. What is a dominant eye?
For most people, one eye is much more dominant in seeing alignments
than the other. Typically, right-handers are right-eyed, and vice
versa. About 5% are "cross-dominant" (e.g., right-handed and
left-eyed) and some are "ambi-ocular" (no dominant eye).
To aim and sight well, it helps to locate your dominant eye directly over
your cue. For cross-dominants, this may call for some adjustments in
stance or neck/head angles. For ambi's, the stick will be under some
spot between the eyes.
Here's how to test yourself:
Hold your thumb up at arm's length, visually blocking some distant
object (for example, a clock or a lamp).
Don't focus on your thumb; focus on the distant object. You'll see a
ghost of your thumb, since your dominant eye will be in line with both
your thumb and the distant object, while your non-dominant eye will be
seeing past your thumb, directly toward the distant object. With one
eye seeing the thumb and the other not, you get a ghost. The ghost is
centered on the distant object because your dominant eye is the one
that tells you what's lined up with what.
So, when you close your non-dominant eye, the thumb becomes solid
instead of ghostly, since the dominant eye is looking directly at the
thumb. When you close your dominant eye, the thumb appears to jump to
the side because the dominant eye (that was making the thumb line up
with the distant object) is not in use.
Stroke into a mirror to see where your dominance spot is, relative to
your shaft. It "should" be directly over the shaft. If it's not, but
you're not having difficulty aiming or sinking balls, don't worry about it.
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