How to use the aim trainer
Pick a drill, set the target size and how long a run lasts (30, 45 or 60 seconds), then press Start. After a 3-2-1 count the targets appear: click them with the mouse, or tap them on a phone or tablet. The score, the clock and your accuracy sit at the top of the arena, and a streak counter appears after three hits in a row. Press Esc or the ✕ button to stop a run; a stopped run is not saved, so your history only holds complete runs.
- Cursor mode (the default) turns your pointer into the crosshair. Hits land exactly where the pointer is, with your system's pointer speed and acceleration, as on your desktop.
- Pointer lock hides the pointer and moves the crosshair by raw mouse movement times the sensitivity, the way a first-person game does. Use it to practise with a feel closer to your game; press Esc to get the mouse back.
- Crosshair & sound sets the crosshair's shape, colour and size, the target colour, the pointer-lock sensitivity and the volume. They are kept for your next visit.
What each drill trains
- Gridshot: three targets on a 5×5 grid; each hit brings a new one somewhere else on the grid. It trains quick target switching: hit, find the next, hit again.
- Flick: one small target anywhere in the arena, at least a quarter of the arena away from your crosshair. It trains long, fast movements that stop on target.
- Tracking: one target strafing left and right at changing speeds while it bobs up and down. Keep the crosshair on it; the score counts the time you are on target, not clicks.
- Microshot: tiny targets, each a short distance from the last. Small, precise corrections matter more here than speed.
- Reflex: a target appears after a short random pause and shrinks until it vanishes after 1.1 seconds. A thin ring shows how long it has left. It trains reacting and taking the first shot quickly.
- Spidershot: a target in the centre, then one out towards the edge, then the centre again. It trains flicking out and coming back to where your crosshair usually rests.
Reading your results
Accuracy is hits divided by shots, and hits per second is hits divided by the run's length. Time to hit runs from the moment a target is drawn (or from your previous hit, when the target was already waiting, as in Gridshot) to the click that hits it. It is taken from the click event's own timestamp, not rounded to the next screen refresh. The median is the steadier number to follow, because one slow target moves the average but not the median.
The shot map turns every shot so that the direction you moved points right. Dots to the right of the centre landed past the target's centre (overshooting), dots to the left fell short, and crosses are misses. In Tracking the map shows where your crosshair sat around the moving target: left of centre means behind it. Thespeed chart splits the run into six slices, so you can see whether you started slowly or faded at the end, and the last chart shows your last 20 runs on the same drill, target size and duration, with your best marked.
Flick and Microshot also show throughput in bits per second. It rests on Fitts's law, in the Shannon form that I. Scott MacKenzie introduced in 1989 and argued for inhis 1992 review of Fitts's law for human-computer interaction, and it evens out runs where the targets happened to land nearer or farther away. Here it is a figure for comparing your own runs: it uses the width the target is drawn at, and its times include reacting to the target, so it doesn't match throughput from lab studies.
Tips for practice
- Warm up with a few runs before you judge a score. In a study of 7,174 players' Gridshot runs (Listman and colleagues, 2021), hits per second rose quickly over the first few runs of each day.
- Go for accuracy first. A miss costs points and ends your streak, and a habit of spraying clicks carries over to games.
- Watch the shot map. If most dots sit past the centre, slow the end of your flicks; if they fall short, follow through.
- Keep the same settings while you track progress. The history and best scores are kept per drill, target size and duration for that reason.
- In pointer lock, match the sensitivity to your game by feel: a flick across the arena should take the same hand movement it takes in the game.
If something feels off
Targets lag behind or the crosshair stutters: close other heavy tabs, and check that your screen runs at its full rate with the refresh rate test. Clicks don't register or double up: try themouse test, which shows every button press and the mouse's polling rate. For pure reaction speed without aiming, the reaction time test measures how fast you respond to a colour change. Pointer lock doesn't start: some browsers refuse it right after you pressed Esc; wait a second and press Start again, or use cursor mode.