Turkey Sandwich was worried about an upcoming test in Discrete Mathematics and was finding it hard to get to sleep. Turkey awoke early in the morning, aroused by devilish laughter, only to see an impish looking homunculus sitting at the bottom of the bed next to a seemingly infinite pile of chips. Hello Turkey it said, would you like to play a little game? This pile contains 43546758343209876 chips and the bottom chip represents your immortal soul. The rules are quite simple. The first player takes some chips, but not all of them. After that we take it in turns to take some chips.

The only rule now is that a player cannot take more in their turn than the previous player took. The winner is the player who takes the last chip. If I win I get to keep your soul and if you win, you get an A in the test. Would you like to go first or second? This seemed a reasonable bet to Turkey. Can you give Turkey a strategy for playing no matter how many chips there are?

Was that too easy? What if a player can take up to twice the number of chips that the previous player took. What is the best strategy now?