Rancho MATHCOUNTS Resource List

Hi there! Here are some resources to help you explore competition math. Hopefully you find them useful :) As always, feel free to reach out to Mrs. Gastelum (LizGastelum@iusd.org, room B6) with any questions, comments, or concerns.

You don’t need to spend lots of money buying books (although we will link some here). Also, we will give you LOTS of practice sites - there’s no need to go through them all. You’re not going to, and spending multiple hours a day on competition math won’t really help you at tryouts - just burn you out.

The most important thing is to have fun - if you can’t have fun while preparing, then not only will it be very painful, but you won’t be able to do well either.

Learning

Morning Star Institute has some great free books here. You only need the first two - the third is completely overkill for MATHCOUNTS.

MATHCOUNTS Prep Guide | Omega Learn - Helpful website with more great free MATHCOUNTS resources!

Art of Problem Solving (AoPS) is another great resource - they have lots of practice problems, and good books.

Competition Math for Middle School by AoPS (link): This book takes you from the very basics all the way to what you’ll see in MATHCOUNTS and AMC8. It gives a pretty good overview of everything, with plenty of practice problems (+ solutions!) I would recommend doing the odd problems - you don’t really need to do every problem, but it’s good to get some practice in. Practice is the easiest way to get stuff to stick in your head (please don’t memorize).

AoPS Vol 1 - More advanced, but helpful if you want to continue on to AMC10 and other high school math competitions. Also covers the more difficult MATHCOUNTS problems, like at States. However, this book runs through concepts very quickly.

AoPS Intro series: Goes through all the content at a slower pace than Volume 1, with many more practice problems

Practice

For The Win! (FTW) - AoPS’s MATHCOUNTS Countdown-style practice. Only really helpful if you want to get fast, or want to do well in the Countdown round.

Alcumus - If you just want to grind problems, this system has tens of thousands of problems, from middle school competition to high school competition.

Past MATHCOUNTS exams - always great practice to get a feel for what MATHCOUNTS questions are like.

Other past math exams, such as AMCs/AIME, CCC, college math tournaments (ie. BMT, SMT, HMMT), though it's important to note that some of these formats are very different than MATHCOUNTS.

solvefire.net - problem grinding site (lots and lots of practice problems + they host their own competitions)

mathdash.com - more practice!

amctrivial.com - practice AMC problems