Gridshot

Nine fixed positions in a three-by-three grid. Three targets are alive at any moment; clear one and another appears in a cell that is currently empty. Your score is targets per second over the session, which is a different number from the millisecond average the flick drill gives you and measures a different thing.

Why the grid is fixed

The whole point of gridshot is that you always know where a target can be. There are nine possible positions and you have seen all of them within about two seconds of starting, so the drill stops testing visual search — hunting the screen for something that appeared somewhere unpredictable — and starts testing the thing it is named for: how fast you can move the crosshair between two known points and stop it there.

That distinction matters more than it sounds. In a random-spawn drill a large part of your reaction time is finding the target, and finding is a perceptual skill that improves on a different curve from aiming. Separating them is why gridshot became the standard warm-up routine rather than one of a dozen interchangeable modes: it isolates the motor half. If your gridshot rate is good but your flick average is poor, your arm is fine and your eyes are doing the work slowly. If it is the other way round, you find things quickly and then wobble on the way there.

Three at once, and nothing expires

Two rules make this drill continuous rather than turn-based. First, three targets are live simultaneously, so there is always somewhere to go next and the crosshair never idles waiting for a spawn. Second, targets never time out. In the flick drill a target you ignore for long enough disappears and counts as a miss; here it simply waits. A miss is only ever a shot that landed on empty space.

That is deliberate, and it changes what your accuracy figure means. On this drill accuracy is shot discipline — the share of your clicks that landed on something — rather than a measure of whether you kept up with the spawn rate. Keeping up is what targets per second measures, and separating the two numbers is more useful than folding them together. You can be fast and sloppy, or slow and clean, and the results screen will tell you which.

When a target is cleared, its replacement is chosen from the cells that are empty at that moment, with the just-cleared cell still counted as occupied. So a target can never respawn where you have just clicked. Without that rule the optimal strategy would be to sit on one cell and click as fast as you can, which measures your mouse button rather than your aim.

Reading targets per second

Targets per second is hits divided by session length. It is a rate, not a latency, and it rewards a completely different thing from a millisecond average: consistency. One brilliant flick does nothing to a thirty-second rate, and one moment of hesitation costs you the same as one slow flick. That makes it a much steadier number session-to-session than a reaction time average, which is why it is worth tracking as a progress metric.

As a rough calibration on this drill's target size and spacing: steady grid shooting sits around 1.2 to 1.5 targets per second, and past 1.8 you are flicking straight to the next target rather than hunting for it. Those are the drill's own rating bands and nothing more — a difficulty curve tuned to how this page is configured, not a measurement of any population. Target size, grid spacing and screen size all move the number, so compare your rate to your own rate on the same machine rather than to anyone else's.

How to actually train with it

Gridshot is a warm-up before it is a workout. Two or three thirty-second runs at the start of a session get your hand calibrated to your sensitivity, which is most of what a warm-up is for. Beyond that, the useful discipline is to run it at a rate you can hold cleanly rather than the fastest rate you can survive: overshooting and correcting builds the habit of overshooting, and that habit follows you into the game. Watch the accuracy number, and back off the pace until it stops falling.

Sixty-second runs are the honest test. Fifteen seconds rewards a burst; a minute exposes whether your form holds when your forearm gets tired, which is much closer to what a real match asks of it. If your rate over sixty seconds is well below your rate over fifteen, the thing to train is endurance and grip, not speed.

Frequently asked questions

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