Colour every vertex of a graph independently and uniformly with three colours, and retain precisely the edges whose endpoints have different colours. Each edge is retained with probability , so linearity of expectation gives expected retained edge count
Some colouring therefore retains at least edges. Its retained subgraph is three-colourable, and deleting edges if necessary leaves exactly
edges without increasing its chromatic number. This is the three-colourable two-thirds subgraph lemma.
To prove sharpness, take . If is three-colourable and its colour classes have sizes , then they are independent sets, so
where the final inequality follows from Cauchy-Schwarz inequality. Since ,
Given , choose with . Then every three-colourable subgraph has at most edges.