After Souma's turn in block A of the autumn preliminaries, the standings were thus:
As you can see, there's a tie for fourth between Marui and Ibusaki. It was mentioned in episode 23 that if there were to be a tie that affects who passes the preliminaries, the judges would vote to determine who passes and who doesn't.
So I figure they must have voted on whether Marui or Ibusaki would be the fourth contestant from block A - but which one of them won the vote? During the after-party, Yoshino mentions that Ibusaki was probably sulking in his room, so I guess maybe Marui won? But nobody seemed to explicitly acknowledge that Marui had made it through, so I'm a bit confused.