Hello everyone,

I just wanted to share something that has been on my mind for a long time. I’ve been working very hard on competitive programming — practicing daily, solving problems, and improving my logic. But something strange (and honestly painful) keeps happening to me.

On LeetCode, my best contest performance (Weekly Contest 449) came when I solved Q4 for the first time. My rank was around 500, and I was so happy and excited for a big positive delta — but then the contest was declared unrated due to an error in problem C.

And today, on Codeforces, I had another of my best performances. For the first time, I solved Problem E1 in a Div1+2 round. My rank was around 1100 (note: my previous best rank was 2258), and I was so excited that I would finally get a big rating boost… but then I saw the announcement: the round was declared unrated because of a missing condition in Problem D.

It feels like every time I perform my absolute best, something out of my control ruins it. I was about to beat my previous record by a huge margin, but again… unlucky.

I know rating is not everything, and I mainly do this to improve my skills — but you can imagine how discouraging it feels when your rare peak performances don’t “count.”

This has happened to me back-to-back, and I’m feeling very sad right now.