Invitation to the Bay Area Programming Contest on March 27th

#	User	Rating
1	tourist	3985
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3	jqdai0815	3682
4	Benq	3529
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7	Radewoosh	3410
8	hos.lyric	3399
9	ecnerwala	3392
9	Um_nik	3392

#	User	Contrib.
1	cry	169
2	maomao90	162
2	Um_nik	162
4	atcoder_official	161
5	djm03178	158
6	-is-this-fft-	157
7	adamant	155
8	awoo	154
8	Dominater069	154
10	luogu_official	150

Hello Codeforces!

We are excited to invite you to the first ever Bay Area Programming Contest! The contest is open for everyone to participate, and will start on Saturday, March 27, 2021 at 9:00^UTC-7.

The contest was written by me, pocafup, EndlessVoid, ant101, and NikhilC.

There will be two divisions, the Novice division and the Advanced division. The Novice division is for participants with one year or less of programming experience and little to no contest experience, and the Advanced division is for everyone who doesn't meet that criteria. Each division will have 8 problems to solve in 4 hours. We will be giving out prizes totaling to at least 400 dollars for the top pre-college students in both divisions. This is an individual contest.

The contest will conducted in Codeforces groups. ~~We will send out an invite to the group on our Discord server a day before the contest starts~~ See the next paragraph for information about the contest groups. Signups, as well as more details about the contest and its prizes can be found at https://bayareacontest.org/.

There are 2 Codeforces groups. One is for official participants who are prize-eligible, and one is for unofficial participants who are not prize-eligible. To be prize-eligible, you must be a pre-college student. In addition, if you're taking Novice, you must have a year or less of programming experience. If you aren't sure if you're prize eligible, join our Discord server and ask an organizer. Please only join one group, and join as a Participant.

Inside each group, there will be a practice contest, which is already open. Please use the practice contest to make sure you're familiar with Codeforces, and take this opportunity to research and test out fast i/o techniques in your language.

For the actual contest, there will be two more contests that appear in the group. One will be Novice and one will be Advanced. Please only register for the division you plan to participate in.

Group for official (prize-eligible) participants

Group for unofficial participants

Please join our Discord server for contest announcements and updates. In particular, prize distribution will be done through Discord.

We hope to see you on the leaderboard!