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jmc

counting and probability senior

Problem

Seven teams play a soccer tournament in which each team plays every other team exactly once. No ties occur, each team has a chance of winning each game it plays, and the outcomes of the games are independent. In each game, the winner is awarded a point and the loser gets 0 points. The total points are accumilated to decide the ranks of the teams. In the first game of the tournament, team beats team The probability that team finishes with more points than team is where and are relatively prime positive integers. Find
Solution
The results of the five remaining games are independent of the first game, so by symmetry, the probability that scores higher than in these five games is equal to the probability that scores higher than . We let this probability be ; then the probability that and end with the same score in these five games is . Of these three cases (), the last is the easiest to calculate (see solution 2 for a way to directly calculate the other cases). There are ways to to have victories, and ways for to have victories. Summing for all values of , Thus . The desired probability is the sum of the cases when , so the answer is , and .
Final answer
831