Analysis reveals limitations on transitive tournaments, indicating constraints on the chromatic number.
We extend the list of tournaments S for which the complete structural description for tournaments excluding S as a subtournament is known. Specifically, let $Δ(1, 2, 2)$ be a tournament on five vertices obtained from a cyclic triangle by substituting a two-vertex tournament for two of its vertices. In this paper, we show that tournaments excluding $Δ(1, 2, 2)$ as a subtournament are either isomorphic to one of three small tournaments, obtained from a transitive tournament by reversing edges in vertex-disjoint directed paths, or obtained from a smaller tournament with the same property by applying one of two operations. In particular, one of these operations creates a homogeneous set that induces a subtournament isomorphic to one of three fixed tournaments, and the other creates a homogeneous pair such that their union induces a subtournament isomorphic to a fixed tournament. As an application of this result, we present an upper bound for the chromatic number, a lower bound for the size of a largest transitive subtournament, and a lower bound for the number of vertex-disjoint cyclic triangles for such tournaments. The bounds that we present are all best possible.
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Kim et al. (2025) studied this question.
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