As some of you might be aware, I decided to try pretty hard for Candidate Master last quarter. The main thing I did was try to take as many virtual contests as possible, particularly at the start of the quarter, kinda following from what lnsuyn did here. What I realized in hindsight was that it's hard to commit to regular virtuals and actually upsolving problems when you're a full-time college student. Anyway, that's beside the point. I did 17 virtual contests, and I found the results quite interesting.

I took progressively newer contests over time, and I made a fake rating for myself starting at 1600, so I could see how my virtual rating would change.

Obviously, there are some limitations, as I included Div.2s as rated contests even if I had a rating over 2100, but as a current Div. 2 contestant, I think it gets my point across.

It's pretty easy to see that even in contests as late as the 850s, I had maintained candidate master. In the very last contest that I took (which was unrated later), I solved ABDEF, and would've ranked 15th officially (although I took the virtual without problem C, which was impossible to solve correctly, so this shouldn't be taken too seriously).

It's hard to tell how much of this comes from contestants being better, AI cheating, or from virtual contests being a better environment for performing well.

Another interesting thing is that in the earlier contests, I was consistently getting master to grandmaster performance, so you can see that contest difficulty has increased significantly since then.