Tenali Rama, a software engineer from 16th Century Andhra

I concocted a story to tell my future grandchildren based on a mathematical problem discussed in a previous post

Tenali Rama (T) and his King Krishnadevaraya (K) decide to send a culture-warrior to one neighboring country. K says he has too many fit for the job. T says he knows a few from his native place Tenali.  A  pool is formed by mixing the cards with the names of candidates and  K and T.

King suggests picking randomly two cards and repeating the following and the winner for the job is the one remaining in the end.

If both belong to same (either K or T), throw them out and put in a new card from K. Notice K has a lot of people for the job.

If both K and T cards turn up, T gets to put back the T card and King throws away K card.

King lets Tenali Rama to  choose the number of T cards to start with. He is confident he can overwhelm with K cards. K always loses in spite of this because of clever choice of Rama.

King thinks hard and comes up with an idea. He tells Rama that he too knows a few other people from Tenali and adds equal number of T cards to whatever number Rama chooses.

Now King wins all the time. We all know why.

We established that the number of black beans does not matter at all in the coffee bean problem if all that we are interested in is color of the bean remaining at the end of the process. Neither does the random choice of the two beans has any effect on the number of steps in the process or on the outcome we are interested in. Only thing that matters is the parity of the number of white beans that remains invariant before, during, and after the process.

The correspondence here is (K = Black Bean) and (T = White Bean).
Tenali Rama always starts the game with an odd number of T cards and wins.
King gets it after a lot of thinking and proposes a change to make the starting number of T cards even. Now no chance for Tenali Rama. King always wins.