I could tell the story how my team trains to go to ACM ICPC (nohow), but it's not interesting)
It is more interesting to learn how to do nothing, but at the same time go to semi-final or final.
So I wonder if there are teams, that didn't train at all, but at the same time participated in semi-final (or were so close to it)? And how did you achieve such success?)
Go to a weak university.
If the semi-final is equal to last regional before final (SEERC, NEERC, CEERC), then all the teams from Serbia passed there without training. Usually it was first and last step for us.
At least in my region, universities can send any teams to the regional contest (NWERC), and there are many really weak teams. For some teams it can be more like a nice trip together with friends which happens to include a five-hour contest.
Advancing to the World Finals without training is much more difficult. On the other hand, what is training? If a team consists of IOI medalists who don't train anymore at the university, it can still be a successful team.
As the weakest team in China to enter the World Finals, we also trained for not less than 500 hours. I think it is very difficult to enter the World Finals without training.
while our region the arab region is considered one of the weakest regions you'd be surprised that to get to world finals we actually train a lot but e do have a lot of teams that don't do that much training reach the semi-final some even go to the finals some out of sheer luck or due to other factors.
some other regions it is easy to go to the finals with no training so i think the key is be sure that you are in a region where no one trains :V