Hello everyone!

In this blog, I’d like to share my journey into Competitive Programming (CP), along with some tips and insights.

Math to CP

Before I got into CP, I was a math Olympiad enthusiast. I participated in competitions like AMC, SEAMO, IMC, and others, achieving pretty good results—even without significant training. I think my logical thinking helped a lot.

However, I never made it to the IMO. In 9th grade, during my last math Olympiad, I had a disappointing result—I scored 0/50 on the written portion, where you had to prove your solutions. Around that time, I already knew about Codeforces, but the problems seemed too difficult, and I felt it wasn’t for me that time.

That’s when I decided to give Competitive Programming a serious try.

Transitioning to CP wasn’t that hard, since I already had some experience with basic C++. A friend of mine, C0deN1nja, helped me get familiar with the platform and how the system worked.

Unexpected Growth

At first, I thought I would converge somewhere in the middle of the Expert rank. Improving seemed tough, and I didn’t think I had what it took to progress much further. But to my surprise, I reached Expert in just two months—and then I began aiming for Candidate Master.

At the time, I couldn’t imagine becoming a Master anytime soon. It felt like a whole new level, and I thought I’d first need to become a consistent CM.

Then came Educational Codeforces Round 174 (Rated for Div. 2). I was solving problems as usual, until I reached Problem E. As I read through it, I instantly recognized it was very similar to 1686D - Linguistics. The only twist was converting “exactly” to “at most” using some mathy techniques.

Thanks to that familiarity, I got a bit lucky and performed well in that contest. I knew I’d likely drop in the following rounds, but it didn’t take long before I bounced back and regained Master.

I placed 22nd in Codeforces Round 1011 (Div. 2), and came close to reaching International Master in Codeforces Round 1012 (Div. 1)—if only it hadn’t been for Problem C1. (Who knows, maybe IM is not that far either?)

Tips(?)

I’m not the best to give advices—everyone has their own training methods. But I can give a couple tips which could be helpful to you:

• Don't practice topic-wise (unless you need to), if you want to improve your pattern recognition and avoid "idea forcing".

• Try many different ideas on a problem if stuck, this will be helpful to improve your intuition and it will be a huge experience boost. (I believe)

I was never afraid of learning new things, I think that's why I could reach Master so easily.

If you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the comments!