For a great while of my CP career I had no idea how such, at a first glance, insignificant things might affect the runtime of the code. And till this day I keep seeing many beginners having lack of knowledge about this so-called effect, that's why I would like to share it here and hope it'll help you out someday.

First code 164992399 executes in a time of 1918ms.
Second code 164991769 executes in a time of 280ms.

Notice 2 drastically different runtimes (6x difference!). The reason for that is pretty straightforward: in this code one of three IF statements gets a true response way more often than others. While the first code has an IF statement with 2 at the end, the second code has such IF statement at the beginning.

That is why you might want to dive into such things into your code when you get a TLE verdict or you feel you might hit the bound of some problem.