teams participated in a basketball tournament. Each team has played with each team exactly one game. There was no tie. If in the end of the tournament the -th team has wins and loses prove that:
Problem 1387
Official solution
1. Each team plays with every other team exactly once, so the total number of games each team plays is . Therefore, for each team , we have:
where is the number of wins and is the number of losses for team .
2. We need to prove that:
3. Start by considering the expression:
4. Using the identity , we can rewrite the sum as:
5. Since for all , we can factor out from the sum:
6. Next, observe that the total number of wins in the tournament is equal to the total number of losses because each game results in one win and one loss. Therefore:
7. This implies:
8. Substituting this back into our earlier expression, we get:
9. Therefore:
10. This implies: