virajudaysingh's blog

By virajudaysingh, history, 3 years ago, In English

Hi. I have been doing programming for 2 years now. When I am practicing, I am able to do 1400-1600 in roughly about an hour. However, during a live contest I mess up and am not able to do even 1400. In fact, in the last contest I wasn't able to do a 1200 problem. I am aiming to achieve 1400 rating for now. Can anyone please tell me how I can go about?

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3 years ago, # |
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Do you look at the tags when solving these 1400-1600 problems? I think that tags are a major spoiler and so I switched them off in the settings of my account.

Also have you tried virtual contests?

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3 years ago, # |
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Start giving contests a bit too frequent and start solving more problems, Dont focus much on greedy or Constructive algos question of rating 1400-1600 while solving .

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3 years ago, # |
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When I was in the same situation as you, I started giving virtual contests almost daily(for a month) and tried to upsolve problems till rating 1600 in each and every one of them. This gave me the much-required confidence as well as much-needed experience of solving problems during a live contest.

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3 years ago, # |
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In 2 years you only solved 300 problems. You can solve more and more problems and see the results. Only giving contests won't help if you are not practicing much.

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3 years ago, # |
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Just be consistent, give contest regularly and must upsolve till D !!

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3 years ago, # |
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My suggestion:

1 If you mean you solve one 1400-1600 problem in about an hour when practicing, that is not fast enough, because in real contest you won't be given so much time to solve them

2 If your troble is that you can't solve problems in REAL CONTESTS, try to virtual participate more, by practicing in such circumstances you will certainly be able to progress more efficiently xd

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3 years ago, # |
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All the best, I hope you reach your desired goals soon. You could refer to this blog for the requisite practice needed to climb the ranks, the different algorithms and ways to practice. As others have pointed out, virtual contests will help greatly, you could give those on Codeforces or Atcoder or both. Do keep in mind to give those contests with utmost sincerity as that's a requirement, for the longest time I used to take virtual contests lightly but I can tell you now that it doesn't help to do it that way.

Also, on CF-visualizer, I could see that you have only solved 56 questions in total for the difficulty range 1400-1600, triple that amount, and solve more questions in tags that frequent in B/C in Div-2s nowadays and you'll probably see improvement. Per my analysis, most people I know who're doing well and practice primarily on Codeforces have 50-100 solved questions across each difficulty level from [their rating — 200] to [their rating + 200].

A couple more pointers at the end (sorry for the long text)- Don't fear rating falls/ worship rise if that creates anxiety/pressure during contest. I tried to avoid that by believing in myself. I knew that even if I fell a 100 rating points in a contest, my actual competency didn't fall, I can reach my peak once more and thus I shouldn't worry.

And at last — work hard, it isn't visible at first but over time it will be. Questions and concepts that used to seem daunting to me a few months back have become easier now and I heavily rely on tools I didn't know and whose use I legit feared.

Happy Learning :)

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7 months ago, # |
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You did it, congratulations :)