Most gun stocks are straight, but on better guns the stocks are subtly bent in one direction or the other. This is called cast. The bend is about 1/8 of an inch or maybe 1/4 inch, so we are not talking about a banana. You might not really even notice it if you glanced at it. (These sketches are courtesy of Bill Hanus's website.) Left handed shooters may use "cast on" while right-handed shooters would use "cast off".
What the bend, or cast, is intended to do is allow a more natural alignment of the shooter's dominant eye along the ridge of the gun. You don't sight a shotgun as you do a rifle. Instead you look along straight along the line of the barrels, without looking at the barrels, at the object you would like to hit. Just as you don't look at the bat in baseball or the racket in tennis, you look at the object you want to hit. When you have a consistent and accurate alignment of the eye, the barrel, and the lead hand, you have a better chance of hitting the bird or the clay.
When cast is absent (or goes the wrong way) you might cant or twist the barrels of an over-under gun. This aligns the top barrel with your eye, but the bottom barrel is out of the vertical plane and presto, your first shot (usually from that bottom barrel) is off.
I don't want to oversell what cast will do for me or anyone else. One of the better shooters that I know is totally indifferent to cast. He is left handed, but shoots the guns right off the rack. He said that at one time he went through the whole ritual of making minuscule adjustments, but nowadays he just shoots.
Of course, his is similar to the story that Lee Trevino would win bets by using a taped-up Coke bottle on the end of a chain to out-drive other golfers. It can be done, but not by me.
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