Question

5 ) A basketball league has a single- elimination tournament that begins with 32 teams playing in 16 games. After the first game, only 16 teams remain in the tournament to play 8 games. This continues until there is a winner. How many total games were played in the tournament?

Answer 1

To solve this problem, we can start by noticing that each round cuts the number of teams in half. Therefore, we can create a table to see how many teams are left after each round:

Round Number of Teams

1 32

2 16

3 8

4 4

5 2

6 1

We can see that there are 6 rounds in total, and that the number of games in each round is half the number of teams. So we can calculate the number of games for each round and add them up to get the total number of games:

Round Number of Teams Number of Games

1 32 16

2 16 8

3 8 4

4 4 2

5 2 1

6 1 0

Adding up the number of games for each round, we get:

16 + 8 + 4 + 2 + 1 + 0 = 31

Therefore, a total of 31 games were played in the tournament.