Are You Playing Your A Game, B Game, or C Game?
Most players think about their aim in terms of their best sessions. The clips that felt clean, the days where every flick landed, the lobbies where you felt like you could not miss. That version of your aim is real, but it is also not the version that shows up every time you sit down to play or train.
Jared Tendler, a mental performance coach who has worked with professional poker players, golfers, and competitive gamers, developed a framework for thinking about this that is worth understanding if you take your improvement seriously. He calls it the A game, B game, C game model, and once you understand it, it changes how you think about training, sessions, and what progress actually looks like.
What the Three Levels Mean
Your A game is your peak. It is the version of your aim that shows up when everything is working, when you are rested, focused, and in a rhythm. Your reaction time is sharp, your crosshair placement is deliberate, and your decisions feel automatic. You aren’t thinking about mechanics… you’re just playing.
Your B game is where most of your sessions actually live. You are competent and consistent, but not exceptional. You might have the impulse to rush a shot or engagement, or play a forced, aggressive angle that you know is low-percentage, but you have enough mental clarity to recognize it and pull back. Your mechanics are present but require more conscious effort. This is normal, and it is where most of your real training happens.
Your C game is what happens when fatigue, tilt, or frustration take over. Decisions you would never make at your best start slipping through. You are reacting emotionally rather than reading situations. You’re running back to the same spot to challenge the player who has dominated you three rounds in a row. You’re not in your aiming pocket. These errors that you make in the C game are not mechanical failures… they’re mental ones.
The goal is not to always be in your A game. That is not realistic, and chasing it is a source of unnecessary frustration. The goal is to understand which game you are in on any given day, train accordingly, and over time watch your floor and your ceiling both move in the right direction.
Why This Matters for Aim Training
The mistake most players make is evaluating their sessions against their A game. They compare every run to their best day and feel like they are regressing when they are not. A session where your aim felt inconsistent, and your reactions were slow, does not necessarily mean you got worse. It might mean you were running on a B game or C game day, which is a different problem entirely.
Tendler also introduces a concept he calls the Inchworm, which is worth understanding alongside the three levels. The idea is that your performance range, from your floor to your ceiling, moves forward as you improve. Progress happens from both ends simultaneously. You raise your ceiling by pushing your A game higher, and you raise your floor by reducing how often your C game shows up and how bad it is when it does. The goal is not just to have better peak sessions but to have fewer truly bad ones.
For aim training, this means two things. First, when you are clearly in your C game, grinding high-difficulty tasks or chasing Benchmark scores is not a good use of that session. You’re running into a potential brick wall of tilt and frustration, and you can potentially lean on bad habits that will not benefit your game in the long run. A lighter, focused warm-up, reviewing replays, or simply recognizing the state you are in and stepping away is a more intelligent response than pushing through. Second, journaling your sessions with some basic context, how rested you were, how the session felt, what was working and what was not, gives you data over time to start seeing patterns in when your A game shows up and what conditions tend to drag you toward your C game.
Remember, to truly improve, you’re going to have to do the work, and that work is often internal, analytical, and most importantly, being honest with yourself.