2016 AMC 12B Problems/Problem 20

Problem

A set of teams held a round-robin tournament in which every team played every other team exactly once. Every team won $10$ games and lost $10$ games; there were no ties. How many sets of three teams $\{A, B, C\}$ were there in which $A$ beat $B$ , $B$ beat $C$ , and $C$ beat $A?$

$\textbf{(A)}\ 385 \qquad \textbf{(B)}\ 665 \qquad \textbf{(C)}\ 945 \qquad \textbf{(D)}\ 1140 \qquad \textbf{(E)}\ 1330$

Solution

We use complementary counting. Firstly, because each team played $20$ other teams, there are $21$ teams total. All sets that do not have $A$ beat $B$ , $B$ beat $C$ , and $C$ beat $A$ have one team that beats both the other teams. Thus we must count the number of sets of three teams such that one team beats the two other teams and subtract that number from the total number of ways to choose three teams.

There are $21$ ways to choose the team that beat the two other teams, and $\binom{10}{2} = 45$ to choose two teams that the first team both beat. This is $21 * 45 = 945$ sets. There are $\binom{21}{3} = 1330$ sets of three teams total. Subtracting, we obtain $1330 - 945 = \boxed{ A) 385}$ as our answer.

2016 AMC 12B (Problems • Answer Key • Resources)
Preceded by Problem 19	Followed by Problem 21
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2016 AMC 12B Problems/Problem 20

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