The Three-Year MATHCOUNTS Marathon Paperback

To be upfront, I was sent a free copy of the book in exchange for writing a review. I gave the book to my math team to look over as I was too busy to read it at the time.My kids loved it right away. My MATHCOUNTS teams have been state champs 14 of the last 15 years and I've coached the national champs twice, so I've seen and written a lot of material. My students found that the book addressed a lot of problems they hadn't seen before and more importantly techniques neither they nor I had seen. After about 2 weeks of them taking turns with the book during math team practice and enrichment meetings, I had to buy 3 more copies of the book so more kids could use it.I would say that this is not the book for kids that are hoping to do well at Chapter or AMC8 though. It is great for kids for whom those tests are easy and who need a leg up on the tougher problems they would see at MATHCOUNTS states/nationals, AMC10/12 and AIME. This book can help get them to the next level.

Every book has a target audience. With this title, it is the advanced middle schoolers who are at MathCounts national level, as well as earlier high schoolers. I agree the questions tend to be hard, but the quality (examples and questions) is superior so I'm happily using it for competitions like AMC10/12, or AIME, beyond MathCounts. There are many more basic MathCounts books at the AOPS site, if you are disappointed with this one. But this one definitely is one of the best competition books I,ve seen in years.

If boggles my mind why someone would put solutions right after the question with almost no space between them. If you don't read with index cards and paper covering the remaining problems, your eyes WILL see the solution and bias your thinking. Arranging papers and cards to block the solutions is incredibly annoying. Detailed solutions are already in the back of the book, so why did you make basic solutions right next to the problem? Destroys the experience for me, but the problems are mostly good and very interesting. A good collection of principles and problems if you can deal with the annoyance of the solutions being visible.

Excellent book. Very well selected topics. This book is not just for competition math. A must read for any student interested in math.

For national mathcounts competition.

Excellent book. Wish the solutions were separate from the problems.

Too hard to middle school students. It probably works for high school students.

A decent math book but not proper for preparing mathcounts. Some problems after chapter review are way too difficult (comparing to the last 5 of the sprint national problems). It's ok to practice using harder problems such as AIME, but may not be a good idea to tackle IMO (or equivalent) problems just for mathcounts.Hard to believe the book was complied by a middle school student (the only author of the book). Also some solutions (or tricks) are not well explained.