I have recently realized that I have published 9 papers at FOCS and only 1 paper at STOC. I started wondering why this happened. I certainly have been submitting more papers to FOCS than to STOC. The ratio is currently 14 to 6. However, this alone does not explain the numbers of accepted papers. My acceptance rate for FOCS is way higher than for STOC - 71% vs 17%. These numbers started looking that extreme after two of my papers have been accepted to this year's FOCS:

• Network Sparsification for Steiner Problems on Planar and Bounded-Genus Graphs, by Marcin Pilipczuk, Micha? Pilipczuk, Piotr Sankowski and Erik Jan van Leeuwen
• Online bipartite matching in offline time, by Bartlomiej Bosek, Dariusz Leniowski, Piotr Sankowski and Anna Zych

All this is due to the fact that I work in an "European way", i.e., I keep on doing most of my scientific work during winter and spring. Summers are for me much less work intensive. For example, when I stayed in Italy the department was even closed during August, so even if one wanted to come to work it was impossible. Poland is not that extreme, but much less things happen during summer, e.g., we do not have regular seminars.

Altogether even if I have some idea during summer I almost never manage to write it down well enough till the STOC deadline. Even if I do submit something to STOC then it usually gets rejected due to bad presentation. This considerably decreases my success rate at STOC. I wonder whether this is more universal and indeed there are more papers authored by Europeans in FOCS than in STOC, i.e., FOCS is easier for Europeans.