I've won a couple of Hackathons recently, and the two keys I found were: 1) Make sure your presentation is flawless 2) Don't take on too big of a challenge. W

I've won a couple of Hackathons recently, and the two keys I found were: 1) Make sure your presentation is flawless 2) Don't take on too big of a challenge. We saw plenty of people that had great projects, but when they went up to present, they had the worst speaking skills I've ever seen, and failed to get their ideas across to the judges. Similarly, we saw plenty of people who took on too much in one weekend, and their presentation consisted of "Well, we wanted to finish X, but we ran out of time" or "This is cool, but doesn't work yet". The projects we won with were never very complicated, but they were highly polished and you could instantly wrap your head around them.