In the past 4 contests, my rating dropped from 1826 to 1490 (336 points). I really don't understand what went wrong. There were some type of problems which I never saw before, but I was not able to solve even the known or easy ones. What should I do?
stop brikking smh
Stop giving contests for 2-3 months, solve 100 more 2000 and 100 more 2100 rated problems without looking at the editorial, and keep solving the problems from just concluded contests as far as you can yourself, and farther with the help of editorial, and then if you resume contests, you will reach 1900 (my guarantee).
As a general rule of thumb, to get to rating X, it is sufficient to solve 100 problems rated X+200 without any help of editorial/tags. But it might not be necessary.
How much time to spend on each problem? I usually solve problems and see editorial only when I am completely stuck but sometimes even one problem takes 2 hours.
I do not see the editorial before 1.5 days. This is because I feel extremely depressed after seeing the solution, if I could have thought of it myself. So around 1 day seems to be fine.
The great thing is, a month and a half back, it took me around one day to solve 1 2200 problem, and now it take me 2-2.5 hours. So I do not regret spending one day on a problem in the initial phase (say 2 weeks). And it is intensely satisfying to solve a hard problem, after the solution has escaped you for a long time. And I had the exact same experience when I was 1600 and used to solve 2000 rated problems.
It does happen sometime, in every contest there will be a problem or atleast a part of problem that is new, only you know what went wrong. But general trend is when your rating decreases, and then when it increases back it will be more than the initial rating. Just keep practicing and giving more VC