Match Editorial

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Room One started with the normal flurry of Level One openings, dmwright ignoring his usual Level Two start to join the rest of the pack. ZorbaTHut, bigg_nate, and malpt raced to be the first, all opening in under five seconds. evd and dmwright both opened after about thirty seconds, while kv waited more than seventy seconds and John Dethridge taking nearly four minutes just to open the first problem.

Only five minutes after the start of the match ZorbaTHut submitted his 300pt solution, for 290.73 points, the highest in the room. evd followed a minute later, earning 287.79 points, closely followed by bigg_nate. kv spent seven minutes on the solution for 283.75 points, followed soon after by malpt. John Dethridge and dmwright submitted at the nine-and-a-half-minute mark, dmwright taking over nine minutes to earn 272.52 points. However, due to his late start, John Dethridge got the second highest score in the room on the Level One problem, spending only 5:45 for 288.32 points.

Each coder moved on to the Level Two in sequence, joining ZorbaTHut, who submitted after only seven minutes of work, earning 353.68 points, the highest score in the room for the 375pt as well. bigg_nate submitted second, getting 328.12 points for eleven minutes of work, followed seconds after by kv, only taking nine and a half minutes due to his late start and slightly slower 300pt. John Dethridge took second in the room on the Level Two as well, finishing after 8:16 for 346.53 points. dmwright spent over twenty minutes on the problem, amd evd took almost 25 minutes, for only 237.95 points.

It became clear very quickly who knew how to solve the 1100. kv submitted first after less than 20 minutes of work, getting a whopping 782.64 points, beaten a minute later by John Dethridge's 16-minute submission for 857.85 points. malpt took 18 minutes, and dmwright spent almost 29 minutes, but despite ZorbaTHut opening it with more than an hour left, it took him over 50 minutes to finally figure out the solution, submitting for only 460.58 points, in fifth place.

However, looking over his problems, malpt found a bug in his 375pt solution, and was forced to resubmit. At this point the problem had been open for over 47 minutes, and combined with the resubmission penalty, this brought his score down to 127.82 points for that problem. This was followed soon after by another bug, in his 300pt this time, and the open-time of almost an hour combined with the penalty downed his score to a devastating 90 points flat, dropping him behind ZorbaTHut.

At the end of the coding phase John Dethridge was leading with 1492.70 points, followed by kv with 1405.30 points, dmwright with 1177.11 points, ZorbaHut trailing with 1104.89 points, and malpt taking ZorbaTHut's old place with only 1035.56 points. bigg_nate and evd didn't submit solutions to the Level Three, and were left with 613.83 and 525.73 points respectively.

Challenge phase, unlike usual in Room One, produced quite a few changes. dmwright challenged kv's Level Two submission successfully, dropping kv down between malpt and ZorbaTHut. John Dethridge took out evd's Level One problem, which served no purpose other than to increase John Dethridge's now enormous lead even more and to drop evd's last place even further down. malpt, now in 5th place, attempted to challenge ZorbaTHut's Level Three problem. If successful, malpt would have vaulted over kv, and combined with ZorbaTHut's drop, would have landed him in 3rd place. However, the challenge was a failure, and malpt dropped back further.

After challenge phase John Dethridge was far in the lead of anyone else, dmwright over 300 points behind, with ZorbaTHut clinging to third place 400 points behind, less than 50 points ahead of kv.

System test kept this positioning - every problem left after challenge phase passed perfectly.

John Dethridge gained 98 rating points from his impressive showing. dmwright, the highest-ranked coder registered for SRM 95, increased his rating by 46. ZorbaTHut, the second highest-ranked coder, only gained 17. malpt did exactly as expected and his rating remained the same, while bigg_nate's only dropped by 4 points. evd, unfortunately, lost 143 points with only a surviving 375pt submission.