i don't know if would like to take advice from me as i am not specialist(my rating is 1372 max 1380) very close to specialist, anyways what i would say is just keep solving more 1400 and 1500 ones and also do more contests, i mean you cannot say this way does not work, you just reached pupil, you need time for specialist so just keep practicing 1400 and 1500 and maybe do more virtuals because i can see you are a bbit slow

Don't know. Never been one. Employed magic to obtain the color cyan, can just suggest that you do the same.

Topics needed to cover(>=1400) in order of their importance.

0) stl in c++ / equivalent . 1) Basic maths , basic logic 2) Searching — Sorting , greedy , two pointers ,sliding window
3) Implementation , stl based
4) Binary search ( very important and a saviour)
5) Number theory ( sieve , gcd , factorisation , prime numbers etc ) 6) Basic bit manipulation and basic combinatorics. (very basic)

Practise:

1) For the first kind of practice you have to solve 40 -50 each in the rating range 800-1400. You can skip a level if you are way too comfortable with it. 2) So do 40 each 800->900->1000->1100->1200->1300->1400. 3) Now at this point you would be able to do A,B and C sometimes. 4) Now do 10 more of each if you want . 5) Now if you do this you will reach near 1400 . 6) You can try CSES problems(it would be more helpful for learning new things.)

i don't know if it works for u, but here's what i can do to become specialist

submit 50 intentional wa's on a

hack others unsuccesfully 50 times

Become an expert and then lose rating