What's a good CPS, really?
Every CPS forum thread has someone claiming 22 clicks a second and someone else calling them a liar. Usually both are right — they're just talking about different tests, different techniques, and in one popular case, different laws of physics.
Here's the distribution as it actually falls. Plain index-finger clicking: most people land between 5 and 7 CPS on a ten-second window. Genuinely fast wrists reach 8 or 9. That's the whole spread for normal clicking — the gap between "average" and "fast" is three clicks a second.
Short windows inflate everything
A 1-second test regularly reads 2–3 CPS higher than a 60-second run from the same hand. Nothing suspicious about it — you can burst faster than you can sustain, the same way a 100 m pace doesn't hold for a mile. It does mean "I get 12 CPS" is meaningless without the window attached. When someone quotes a score, ask the seconds. Our test stores personal bests per window for exactly this reason.
The technique tiers
Jitter clicking gets you to 10–14: you tense the forearm until the hand trembles and let the tremor do the pressing. It works, it's exhausting, and your cursor control degrades while it happens — fine on a click test, mixed blessing in an actual fight.
Butterfly clicking — two fingers alternating on one button — reaches 12–20. The catch nobody mentions: it depends on the mouse. Switches need time to reset, and on plenty of models the second finger's press arrives inside the debounce window and vanishes. If your butterfly score matches your normal score, the mouse is eating the difference. Not your fingers.
Drag clicking is the asterisk tier. Rolling a fingertip across a textured button makes the switch chatter against the contact — 30 to 100 "clicks" a second of pure friction. It shows up on any counter, ours included, but it isn't finger speed, some competitive servers ban it, and it grinds the very switch it exploits. We give it its own tag so it stays in its own league table.
So what counts as good?
Anything above 8 on a plain finger, ten-second window, is quick — top-quarter-ish of what passes through tests like ours. Past 10, you're not clicking harder, you're clicking differently: technique has entered, and the comparison group changes. And if a number ever comes with gaps faster than 15 ms on the readout, it's worth a detour to the double-click checker — sometimes "talent" is a switch on its way out.
One more calibration point before you chase a number: 6 CPS in a game while aiming is worth more than 14 on a blank rectangle. The rectangle doesn't dodge.