Guides / After the first week
The mental gameFocus games
Play one game tonight. Open the Mind tab, tap Focus games, pick a game, and give it one honest run. That score is your athlete's first personal best; every run after is measured against that line and nothing else. One game is enough, and it counts toward winning the day.
How to use it (the boring, correct answer)
- Daily-ish, 5 minutes. Two or three games, one serious attempt each. More isn't better; switched-on is better.
- Match day: the Match Day card includes a quick reaction-game activation: 60 seconds to wake the engine before warm-up.
- Watch the trend, not the day. Personal bests and trends appear in The Proof, inside the Mental Pathway. A bad day is noise; a flat month means switch games for a while.
The philosophy: sharpen, don't replace
The focus games are a supplement, not a substitute. Five focused minutes is a full dose. And like everything in TierBreak, scores are self-referential: every score is compared only with the athlete's own history. No leaderboards, ever: a 12-year-old should be chasing yesterday's self, not a stranger's reaction time.
MATCH POINT mode
Most games have a pressure mode: one mistake ends the run. It exists to make the athlete feel the difference between playing free and playing careful, and to practice staying free anyway. Pressure-mode best streaks are tracked separately.
Focus mode
When a game opens, the rest of the screen fades away: no other cards, no distractions, just the drill. It releases automatically when the run ends.
The games
These are the games behind the Focus games card, and what each one practices.
| Game | What it practices | Modeled on |
|---|---|---|
| Focus drill | Selective attention under interference | Seeing the ball, not the noise |
| Split-step reaction | Simple reaction speed | First move after the opponent's contact |
| Anticipation timing | Interception timing on a hidden trajectory | Reading where the ball will be, not where it is |
| Don't bite | Go/no-go impulse control | Not biting on the short ball that's actually deep |
| Long-match focus | Sustained attention and catching your own lapses | Point 90 of a three-setter |
| Track the ball | Multiple-object tracking | Keeping several moving things in view |
| Serve-zone read | Choice reaction in return language (T / body / wide) | Return-of-serve decisions |
| Toss rhythm | Internal timing: keep tempo blind | The metronome behind a repeatable serve |
| Auditory reaction | Reaction to a sound cue, not a visual one | Answering the ball off the strings, or a late line call |
| Dual-task | Splitting attention across two demands at once | Tracking the ball while reading your opponent's position |
| Peripheral vision | Catching cues at the edge of sight | Noticing movement at the edge of the court |
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Next: The Weekly Review → Then the Mental Pathway, where the games live.
Go deeper
From the blog, where these questions get the long answer.
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