How Eye Dominance Affects Your Billiards Stroke Mechanics

Eye dominance is simply the preference of one eye over the other. Eye dominant affects billiards as it allows you to make an adjustment not just with your head but also your foot position in order for you to hit the target. Roy Pastor discusses more of t

On behalf of TVLesson.com, this is Roy Pastor. I’m a BCA accredited advanced level instructor with BilliardAcademy.com. In this clip on Intermediate Billiards, I’d like to show you how eye dominance affects your stroke mechanics. Firstly, what is eye dominance? Eye dominance is simply a preference of one eye over the other. Most people have the same eye dominance as their hand or foot dominance. Most right handed people for instance will be right eye dominant and most left would be left eye dominant. However, occasionally, there are people who are cross dominant. A right hand person might be a left eye dominant. So how do we find out? I’ve taken a little piece of PVC pipe, you can take almost anything, and hold it out. You can even do this with your fingers making a circle. Hold it about 18 inches in front of you and pick an object across the room that you can see with both eyes. If you close your left eye and you can still see the object, you are right eye dominant, if you close your right eye and you can see with your left, you are left eye dominant. One eye will be out of the picture completely. So for instance for me, I am right eye dominant. I open my right eye, I can see it. If I close my right eye, I can no longer see the object, so I’m right eye dominant. Now, how does this affect us in pool? Well, the position of our head, most people who are right eye dominant, if I’m right handed, most people would be able to keep their head directly over the pool stick and still have good vision. If you are cross eye dominant, most people will find that they can make an adjustment simply by keeping their portion of their head with their dominant eye over the shaft of the pool stick. One thing however you should remember is that primarily, you’re using your eyes to see the target. You can make adjustments not just with your head but also your foot position to make sure that the cue stick is pointing at your target no matter what eye dominance you are. On behalf of TVLesson.com, this is Roy Pastor. Thank you for watching.