noob

How to practice Competitive Programming by Um_Nik

In a contest, you don’t have time to come up with something completely new and original. Yes, you need to get what is the problem about, unravel some layers of reductions and implement the solution, but in a nutshell you know how to do every small part of the problems you will solve in the contest before the contest even starts.

To learn how to solve problems you need to solve problems, solve problems that you don’t yet know how to solve, but that are possible for you to come up with, maybe using a lot of time. These are the problems from the interesting interval, slightly above (or below in some cases) your current level, but not too much above because otherwise you can’t solve them yet. So we need to somehow find a lot of problems near your level, how to do that? The answer is rather simple: go to a place that has a lot of problems of various difficulties and doesn’t have a time limit. It is not a contest, it is an archive.

I'll also recommend you to start practicing from archive. Otherwise you'll keep getting false sense of accomplishment in virtual contests by solving the problems you already know how to solve (If you're not upsolving). And yes, you can give Virtual Contest once in a while to get some confidence and learning time management.

gooning daily help me a lot, you should try it, good luck onto becoming pupil!

pupil in 60 days. Day 1(for myself).