Before 1995, in Football Championship of Ukraine in all leagues the team received 2 points for winning, 1 point for a draw and 0 points for a defeat. Since 1995, winning would give 3 points to the team, 1 point for a draw and 0 for a defeat. Football Federation has decided to transpose all the championships that were held in all leagues during all years to the new grading system, believing that the distribution of places will not change drastically. However, it turned out that in the championship in 1927 in one of the regional leagues teams held the championship in one round, i.e. each team played with each another once. There team "A" gained the largest amount of points, and the team "B" gained the least number of points. But after the points calculation according to the new rules team "B" gained the most points, and team "A" gained the least amount of points. For which the least this could happen?
Here the fact that the team has the lowest or the highest score, means that no other team gained this number of points.
Solution
Team "A" is the winner when 2 points are calculated for a victory, and takes the last place when 3 points are calculated for a victory, while for the team "B" it is all the way around. Let the team "A" win matches and have draws. Team "B" will have wins and draws, respectively. Since there could not be only two teams, the rest of the teams gained the numbers of points that between the results of teams "A" and "B" in both cases of calculation. So we have the following inequalities:
Consider the possible values of for different values of .
For we have that which is impossible.
For we have that which is impossible.
For we have that which is impossible.
For we have that which is impossible.
For we have that .
Thus, the minimum possible value for . So either or . Thus the smallest value for . Since it is clear that , then , i.e. the should be at least 12 teams.
What is left to show that for 12 teams there exists such distribution of points. In the table (fig. 41) victory is denoted by 1, defeat by 0 and empty cells correspond to draws between the teams.
Then in the championship when calculating by the rule "2 points for a win" team "A" (number 2 in the table) gains 12 points, "B" (number 1 in the table) gains 10 points, and the rest of the teams gain 11 points each.
In the championship when calculating by the rule "3 points for a win" team "A" gains 13 points, the team "B" gains 15 points, and the rest of the teams gain 14 points each.

Fig. 41