Welcome back to the BMT blog! With BMT 2026 coming up in just over a month, we wanted to provide some team-oriented tips to help you prepare for the team-based rounds: Power Round and Guts Round. These rounds can be overwhelming since they deviate from typical formats for math competitions and they have a significant amount of collaboration, so we hope that these tips can help you orient yourself with your team and know what to expect.
Parallelizable Work
A common suggestion in team-based rounds is that you should split up work between your teammates, but what that looks like isn’t always clear because it varies depending on the test and team strengths. However, here are some general tips for each team round:
Power Round
- Past the introduction, sections are usually standalone, which allows team members to divide and conquer the different concepts.
- This may seem detrimental in cases where questions depend on results from other sections, but you can overcome this downside by letting team members explain concepts to other team members. Working through and explaining to each other can help the whole team understand the concepts, especially to identify more confusing areas of the topic.
- In a similar vein, it’s extremely important to have team members review each other’s proofs both for correctness and clarity, because we need to understand your proof for you to get points on it!
Guts Round
- It can be hard to figure out how to parallelize and distribute work when you have smaller sets of 3 problems that need to be done in a shorter amount of time. Nonetheless, you can still assign problems based on team members’ strengths, which we’ll talk about in the next section.
- If the problem has some parallelizable calculations or team members can bounce ideas off of each other, it’s beneficial for 2 or 3 people to work on the same problem.
- For very difficult problems, evaluate where your team is confident they can get points and possibly skip some if they aren’t.
- Finally, it’s also very important in this round to have team members look over each other’s work because you would be remiss to leave relatively easy points on the table due to careless errors.
Strategy for dividing work (“Divide and Conquer”)
- This is mainly applicable to the Guts Round, but it’s important to realize when preparing for BMT that not everyone needs to be good at everything.
- It’s a much better use of time to have each team member focus on a specific topic, and for them to focus on questions in their respective topic as they come up in each set.
- For both the Guts Round and Power Round, it’s also very valuable to assign someone to be a time-keeper, as time management is extremely important for both of these rounds. Decide how much time you will spend on what problems prior to or at the beginning of the round.
Other Power Round tips
- While working through previous Power Rounds is the best way to prepare, another way to prepare for the Power Round is to read more proofs.
- You can do this by reading and internalizing formal math proofs in subjects you already know, as well as reviewing solutions from previous Power Rounds.
- Following similar logic in your work can help with clarity in your answers and graders can potentially award more points.
- We encourage you to research interesting topics by finding textbooks online or at your local library.
Remember that questions on the Power Round are ordered by content and not difficulty! If a problem is stumping your team and you’re unsure how to proceed with it, feel free to skip it and move on to the next question or part. We always make sure that you will have all the information you need to solve a question just in the previous reading and problem statements, never in the answers. Generally, a problem’s difficulty can be evaluated by the number of points it is worth, though conceptually important results can also be high scoring.
Be sure to keep these things in mind when you’re preparing with your team. With that being said, we’ll see you in November!
Best,
Your friends at BMT
