I did it! My main goal for 2022 was to reach red and I succeeded in the very last contest by getting +1 delta and going from cursed 2399 to 2400! I was very afraid it might go back to 2399 after removing cheaters, so I didn't want to celebrate early. But last morning I woke up with 2401, so I hope I'm safe now to say I'm red :D
Oh wait a minute. You don't even know who I am, why should you be happy about me reaching red? Let me introduce myself at least a little first. I am a high schooler from a small country where not many people do codeforces. I'm doing MO and OI for years and I also love CP. But I struggled with motivation for a long time. For most of time I had no one to turn to when practicing CP and not many friend who did it too, so just a few months ago, I wanted to quit doing CF for indefinite time and focus on MO instead. Then after IOI I changed my mind and I'm glad I did. Now I'm more motivated than ever to continue CP and OI and I hope to reach IGM in this year and win IOI gold. It might be impossible, I am well aware I might fail, but I have hopes and I will train hard.
Note that my CF graph doesn't reflect how much I trained because I didn't do CF contests very often. They make me nervous, I prefer
So, not too long after rating changes were updated for last contest, I got a DM asking me how I became red, and now I'm writing this blog to quickly summarize what worked for me and what did not.
I am a slow learner and can't remember and learn algorithms as well as my friends do. I can't even implement SCC on my own! But that doesn't matter, codeforces now days doesn't require almost any advanced algorithms in <3000 rated problems. It might sound surprising to some beginners, but knowing BFS, DFS, union find, Dijkstra, MST, hashing, inverse elements, euclidean algorithm, fast nCk calculation algorithm and segment trees is enough to reach red! So learning advanced algorithms won't help much when trying to reach red. Basic problem solving skills are way more important.
Always practice problems that are above your level. When I was in middle school, I didn't realize this, I just liked the feeling of getting AC, even if the problem was trivial. And I didn't improve.
It is very important to build intuition
