  A (possibly illegal) game of chance, which is described in Chapter 14 of Marc
Elsberg's thriller "GREED", seems to offer an excellent chance of winning.
However, as the gambling starts and evolves over several rounds, the actual
experience of the vast majority of the gamblers in a pub is strikingly
different. We provide an analysis of this specific game and several of its
variants by elementary tools of probability. Thus we also encounter an
interesting threshold phenomenon, which is related to the transition from a
profit zone to a loss area. Our arguments are motivated and illustrated by
numerical calculations with Python.
