We hope you enjoy this special deep-dive from our resident CS expert simba. If you wanna brush up on your competitive CS skills, he also made Bootcamp, a 6-part free course packed with wisdom.

You’d be forgiven for not keeping your ear to the ground of the peripheral realm of social media, but a couple of brands caused quite a stir over the last couple of weeks.

A keyboard arms race was kicked off, courtesy of Razer’s new “Snap Tap” feature, included in a software patch for their latest line of keyboards.

With a short video demonstration posted on X, the CS community’s attention became fixated on this “breakthrough” in technology.

Some were keen, others felt it crossed the line between tech and cheat, such as ropz, who said it shouldn’t be allowed at all. So what’s the big deal, what does “Snap Tap” do anyways?

Before you can understand what Snap Tap does, it’s important to know what a null bind is: A null bind refers to a special bind typically created with console commands that make you unable to pass the input of multiple keys at the same time.

These binds, or “nulls,” can be applied to any key, but are typically only applied to movement keys in CS, specifically those that are used for (counter) strafing. This prevents A and D key presses from being passed at the same time.

TL;DR: These special binds enable you to hit frame-perfect counter-strafes every time.

In a game where precision is measured in milliseconds, this is a huge advantage. So much so that most competitive CS leagues banned null binds (and still do, at the time of writing.)

It’s known as SOCD, or Simultaneous Opposite Cardinal Direction. Sounds like something you’d catch on a really bad night out, but long story short, whenever you see that acronym, it’s referring to this tech. And it’s been around for ages (note post date).

So where does Snap Tap fit into all this? Like a square peg, in a… square hole.

Snap Tap does the same exact thing that null binds do, the only difference being that the inputs are done in Razer’s keyboard firmware rather than in-game.

A head ESL admin confirmed that the keyboard is allowed in tournaments, making it a relatively safe assumption that implementations from other keyboard manufacturers like Wooting are also safe to use.

There’s been no official statement from ESL in regards to whether pro players can use null binds instead of shelling out hundreds for a new keyboard. But FACEIT have confirmed that you can use either on their platform without fear of being bludgeoned by the ban hammer.

There’s no guarantee that this is the way it will stay, so we’d recommend keeping your wallet (and config) closed for the time being.

War never changes, but keyboards certainly do.