Maths Olympiad Prep

Track / Stage 3 / 29 of 260 #29 of 1964

Problem 29

AMC 10/12, early questions
Combinatorics Difficulty 3.1 Multiple choice

Team A and team B play a series. The first team to win three games wins the series. Each team is equally likely to win each game, there are no ties, and the outcomes of the individual games are independent. If team B wins the second game and team A wins the series, what is the probability that team B wins the first game?

Pick one

Official solution

There are at most 55 games played.
If team BB won the first two games, team AA would need to win the next three games. So the only possible order of wins is BBAAABBAAA.
If team AA won the first game, and team BB won the second game, the possible order of wins are: ABBAA,ABABA,ABBAA, ABABA, and ABAAXABAAX, where XX denotes that the 55th game wasn't played.
There is 11 possibility where team BB wins the first game and 44 total possibilities when team AA wins the series and team BB wins the second game. Note that the fourth possibility (ABAAX)(ABAAX) occurs twice as often as the others, so we put 11 over 55 total possibilities. The desired probability is then (A) 15\boxed{\textbf{(A) }\frac{1}{5}}.

Source: NuminaMath-1.5, licensed Apache-2.0. Statement and solution reproduced as published; topic, difficulty and ordering added by this site.