Strategy for Beating the Jumping Pegs Game

Factual Questions
1

If you don’t know what I mean by “Jumping Pegs Game,” I’ll try to explain it to you. You’ve seen one if you’ve ever eaten at a Cracker Barrell.

Anyway, the game consists of a traingular wooden block, with fifteen holes drilled into it. At the top of the triangle is one hole, two below that, three below that, etc. Each hole save one has a golf tee in it.

The idea is to jump one peg over another and place it in the empty hole, removing the peg that was jumped. Repeat this process until no more jumps are possible. Ideally, you want to leave only one peg standing. If you’re really REALLY good, the one peg standing is in the hole that was originally empty.

Try as I might, I can never leave fewer than two pegs. The last time I played the game, I thought to myself, “Surely someone at the SDMB has worked out an algorithim or something to beat this game.”

So how about it? Anybody have a method of beating this game?

2

Here are a few solutions. If you don’t want to know, don’t click the link, because there are big time spoilers in there.

3

Wow, thanks!

4

First, I’d like to thank Airman Doors, USAF for pointing me to this site. I can now (maybe) amaze my wife and go from a complete idjit to a world-class wonder genius at this while we’re waiting for our order.

Second, and this is kinda weird, but I knew exactly what HeyHomie was talking about in the title, no explanation was necessary; I immediately thought, “Hey, Cracker Barrel!”