Bangkok Post – A faint odour hovers in the air, cheap perfume laced with sweat and anticipation. And there is no dinner-jacket in sight.
It is noon in the casino on Singapore’s entertainment island Sentosa and business is booming. Men and women, all Asians in shorts and T-shirts, are sitting at the machines. Two wheelchairs are in the aisle.
A few metres away, at the roulette tables, the evocative order to stop betting – “Rien ne va plus” – is no longer heard, but simply displayed on a sign at the touch of the croupier’s button.
Ever since Singapore opened two casinos in January 2010 with hundreds of gaming tables and thousands of gambling machines, people are betting like there’s no tomorrow.
On the ground floor, common folk hope for a stroke of luck, slapping 100 Singapore dollar bills (about 80 United States dollars) down on the card tables. But the chips go up to 5,000 Singapore dollars.
These sums are peanuts for the high rollers in the VIP areas, where stakes rise into the millions.
The biggest revenue for Singapore’s casinos still comes from VIP players,” sociologist Melody Lu Chia-Wen told the Macau Business Daily.
“That percentage is higher than in Macau: 90%,” added the associate professor of sociology at Macau University, who has studied Singapore’s casino scene.
With its five-star hotels and world-class asset management banks, Singapore is a prime location for the very wealthy.
Not yet four years into operation, the city-state’s casino complex is already one of the world’s most successful.
China’s Macau remains clearly in the lead, with around 40 billion US dollars in revenue per year from its more than 30 casinos.
But with 5.85 billion US dollars from its two casino complexes in 2012, Singapore is snapping at the heels of Las Vegas for second place. The famed US gambling strip saw revenues of 6 billion US dollars from its around 40 casinos last year.
