Nearly all gaming keyboards use the conventional typewriter-inspired keyboard shape. That is not a good shape for typing or gaming or frankly anything else.

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The gaming experience is vastly improved by keyboards that have thumb keys, such as the Kinesis Advantage or the Maltron.

If you move the Shift key to one of the thumb keys (which you should¹), then Shift-hotkeys and Control-hotkeys become much easier to press. Looking at how pro StarCraft players have to contort their hands to reach the shift key, I can’t help but imagine how much better they’d be at the game if they used a proper keyboard with thumb keys.

Okay, maybe they wouldn’t be better. But at least hitting the buttons would be easier.

I saw an interview with StarCraft pro player Clem (I can’t find the video now) where he described how he uses his palm to hit the spacebar while his fingers are on the number row. And it left me thinking, this would be so much easier if you used a keyboard with thumb keys.

I personally use the Kinesis Advantage—it’s the cheapest of the good ergonomic keyboards, and it works well for me. I’ve become spoiled by the thumb keys, and now I can hardly stand to play games using my laptop keyboard.

If you want to do even better, you can get a split keyboard like the Kinesis Advantage 360 or the Naya Create because they let you game with half a keyboard to make more room for your mouse. In many games, this will require rebinding some keys that normally live on the other side of the keyboard, but that’s a fair compromise.

You could take this even further with the Maltron Single Hand, which is a one-handed keyboard with every key on one side.

Those keyboards weren’t designed with gaming in mind. The most sensible gaming-specific keyboard I’ve seen is the Razer Tartarus:

I’ve never tried this keyboard so I can’t speak from experience, but it looks like a good concept. The keyboard has a small footprint to leave more room for the mouse, and it makes some innovations that I haven’t seen anywhere else. The thumb zone has a joystick rather than just buttons, and the keyboard has a special feature where you can bind keys to do two different things depending on whether you do a half-press or a full press (although some people report finding this feature difficult to use).

One complaint is that the Razer Tartarus doesn’t have many buttons—it could easily have twice as many while still leaving plenty of room for the mouse. Having not used either, I think I’d prefer the Kinesis Advantage 360. But at least the Razer Tartarus is thinking about gaming from the ground up, as opposed to the usual “typewriter-shaped keyboard with expensive keyswitches and RGB lighting”.

It pains me every time I see a pro gamer using a regular keyboard. If your livelihood depends on being good at games, then you should take the time to learn the best tools available.

Posted on Nov 29, 2025

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