The March of Destruction begins!

Welcome to March 1st. After the mysterious leap day which I hope all of you enjoyed dressing blue and yellow and pretending to cry to receive candy, I think it is worth pointing out that March is going to be an exceptional month in regards to programming contests.

First of all, the obvious thing, there are going to be 4 TopCoder SRMs. That's not by itself a big deal though. Consider that 2 of those matches will be held on a Saturday, and one of them will have money prizes. Of course, saying 5000 USD in prizes! is basically a marketing scam. Once you consider that thanks to how the system distribute money prizes in SRMs and that there may be 2400 coders in this round, a more honest advert would say Low probability to win 50 USD!. But it is still kind of an incentive. Expect that match to get full of high level coders. And at last, don't forget that the first qualification round of the TopCoder Open is the 31st !

There will probably be the usual amount of Codeforces too. But for those who are not dinosaurs over 23 years old, there is an open tournament from an European social network with 50 onsite finalists and will be hosted at codeforces: http://codeforces.com/blog/entry/3977. Of course, it begins in March.

All of this added to the usual contests you can expect in a month, sums up to a month that will be quite heavy on programming contests.

The registration for the google code jam begins on March too. The rounds start in April, so March is going to be a good month to prepare. In fact, if March seemed strong, April will start a chain of months in which you will have to alternate between TCO and codejam rounds...