Keep Your Chin Up

Posted on June 1st, 2022

There has always been a lot of debate over where to position your cue. For most players, the cue is positioned directly beneath their chin. Other players prefer to have the cue under their dominant eye. I don’t think there is a right or wrong answer here. I believe the answer is whatever is most comfortable and effective for the player.

The best way to determine what’s best, of course, is to experiment with your cue alignment. I usually start out with having my students set up a simple stop shot. Then I have them line up the shot with their cue positioned under their chin. When they’re down on the shot, I check their alignment.

If it doesn’t look right, I’ll have them position the cue beneath their dominant eye. Then the other eye. Checking alignment on the three options will let me and the shooter know which is best. The next thing you know, the player is lined up perfectly for each shot.

How do you know which eye is your dominant eye? Some people have tricks to tell which eye is dominant, but those have never really worked for me.

I prefer to simply set up a stop shot and have the player shoot it 50 times with the cue positioned under their chin, and 50 times under each eye. That’s 150 shots overall. If you track the number of makes and misses, the player will be able to tell which position offers the most consistency.

(In addition to tracking makes and misses, you can also keep track of whether the cue ball drifts to one side or the other on the shot. That is an indicator that the player isn’t perfectly aligned.)

Again, I always start with the cue directly beneath the chin because that is the most common alignment. And if you don’t have a coach or instructor, just have a friend watch your alignment on straight-in stop shots. They should be able to tell whether or not your stroke is straight.

Original Post: http://www.billiardsdigest.com/showinstruction.php?id=252