Problem

Source: Thailand MO 2023 Day 1 P4

Tags: combinatorics



A table tennis tournament has $101$ contestants, where each pair of contestants will play each other exactly once. In each match, the player who gets $11$ points first is the winner, and the other the loser. At the end of the tournament, it turns out that there exist matches with scores $11$ to $0$ and $11$ to $10$. Show that there exists 3 contestants $A,B,C$ such that the score of the losers in the matches between $A,B$ and $A,C$ are equal, but different from the score of the loser in the match between $B,C$.