It is 7pm. The usually bare restaurant stirs as patrons shuffle in for their complimentary meal, a presence that rarely invades the karaoke bar across the deck or the open air basketball court. The myriad facilities on board, ultimately, are peripheral and offer only an illusory description of the ship’s main draw.
Dinner here on the M/V Amusement World is no hearty communal affair: It serves simply to punctuate the long hours spent gambling on the cruise, one of two floating casinos operated by the New Century Cruise Lines.
No mention is made on its website about the jackpot machines, the baccarat and roulette tables, or the games of ‘Big-Small’ that fill up the deck, metres away from the hatch that passengers walk through as they board the vessel. Access and admission on board costs just S$25.
Best mates Rishivaran, 21, and Andy, 22, are tucking into a meal of fish and chips as they await the 8pm boat, the day’s last service, that will take them back to the Tanah Merah Ferry Terminal. It is Rishivaran’s first time in a casino, but Andy is no stranger to the gambling floor, having accompanied his grandmother on previous forays aboard the ship.
“Honestly, I think it’s pretty fucked up. All these people come here, sit at the jackpot, and press press press away their CPF (Central Provident Fund) money,” Andy says, despite winning RM100 from the pontoon and roulette tables.
He draws on a cigarette and smiles. “It can get messed up when you lose, but when you’re winning it’s damn exciting.”
The duo stand out amidst the largely elderly crowd, forming part of a growing youth demographic of gamblers. A survey conducted in 2014 by the National Council of Problem Gambling (NCPG) found that 17 per cent of probable pathological gamblers started betting regularly before the age of 18, a threefold increase from 5 per cent in 2011.
Pathological gamblers, according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, are people who exhibit a combination of recurrent problematic gambling behaviours, which include the chasing of losses, wagering increasing amounts of money and gambling when one is distressed.
Psychotherapist Andrew da Roza says that this rise is a reflection of the high-stress environment faced by adolescents, especially in school. “It’s a real bind, with people telling you that you’ve got to get these grades, otherwise you’re going to be living under a bridge begging for money. That culture of stress means that people will turn to things that self-soothe that may be destructive. Gambling is one of those things.”
Back home, the prospect of hitting it rich beckons from every corner:
The sound of shuffling mahjong tiles - named by the Chinese for its aural resemblance to flocking sparrows - are an almost-iconic accent along the corridors of HDB flats.
Along the walkways of neighbourhood shopping districts, the snaking queues of the yearly Toto Hongbao draw.
The shouts of punters that echo across the terraces of the Singapore Turf Club.
For Tan Chor Huat, 64, spending a buck or two on a lottery ticket is just a matter of buying hope. At a Singapore Pools branch in Jurong East, he takes his time to fill out a Toto betting slip with different permutations of his home address and date of birth.
“4D, Toto, all these I just buy for fun. One dollar, one dollar. If you don’t buy, there is no hope. If you buy, even if it’s one per cent of hope, at least there’s still some hope there,” says the unemployed former taxi driver, whose small, occasional winnings keep him going back.
A trip to China, a secondhand car, and replacing the windows of his HDB at are the first things he would do if he ever strikes a windfall.
“A man can always dream,” he says.
According to da Roza, the desire to scale the social hierarchy is one of the key motivators behind gambling avenues such as 4D and Toto, the country’s most popular gambling activities. With its sharpest divides now found along class lines rather than religion or race, Singapore’s lagging social mobility is apparent, as concluded in a 2017 Institute of Policy Studies (IPS) report.
“Life becomes pretty demoralising if the social mobility isn’t there. Having a car, a decent place to live, these are markers of perceived happiness. People feel that unless they have those things, life is meaningless. Gambling looks like a fast way of getting out of that impossible situation. Of moving up,” says da Roza.
Tan is not alone in his fantasy of fortune. Thrice weekly, Jimmy Thung faithfully buys 4D from the famed Singapore Pools outlet in Yishun. The heavy rain has made the queue shorter than usual. But the 58-year-old is unfazed by the bad weather. He places his bets in a mechanical fashion, the way he has done hundreds of times before.
Thung is resigned to the fact that his investment in the lottery is a losing venture. Yet he finds it difficult to break free of the habit, one developed 30 years ago when he started working.
“Blue-collared workers like us, we hardly make enough. Who doesn’t dream of having some extra cash? We can’t keep waiting for our yearly bonus because what if that doesn’t come? So I say - it’s better to create your own fortune.”
Money once spent on cigarettes now goes towards his 4D tickets. He estimates spending $300 a month and admits having to “dig” from what little is left of his last CPF disbursement, his income having dried up since losing his job as a delivery driver.
“It’s not worth it,” he says repeatedly. “I dare not think about how much money I could have saved over all these years.”
The men are just two of the 2.5 million resident gamblers in Singapore, or about 44 per cent of the population. This figure was reported by the National Council of Problem Gambling (NCPG), which defines gamblers as people who have participated in at least one form of gambling activity in the last 12 months.
In 2016, over S$12 billion - or almost S$33 million daily - was spent on gambling. Money spent speculating in the stock market, bets made with illegal bookmakers and dens along the back-alleys of Geylang do not contribute to this figure.
The bulk of this comes from 4D, Toto and sports betting, the purchase of Singapore Sweep tickets - totalling S$7 billion. In addition to the S$1.4 billion spent by punters at the Singapore Turf Club, this combined figure overshadows the S$3.8 billion brought in from both the Resorts World Sentosa and Marina Bay Sands.
With the multitude of widely accessible gambling options, local residents are not the only ones looking to get rich. Nearly 60 storeys beneath the Sky Park of the iconic Sands integrated resort, construction worker Islam Shahidul spends his weekends at the casino hoping to similarly create a fortune.
Islam is $300 richer from a Sunday afternoon of gambling, an amount equivalent to half of his monthly salary. The 29-year-old Bangladeshi beams as he boards a train and heads back to his dormitory in the far west of Singapore. He calls a co-worker, telling him he will wait for him to return so that they can eat their usual, self-prepared dinner in their Sungei Tengah dorm.
Free entry to the gambling floor makes it possible for Islam and his co-workers to try their luck at the gambling floor every weekend. Islam enjoys spending time there as he says that the casino is a form of entertainment not available in Bangladesh, his homeland and a predominantly Muslim country.
Over the past two years of casual gambling at the casino, Islam has managed to roughly break even. But he continues to dream of striking gold.
“Hopefully someday I’ll win enough money so I can get a wife and start a family.”
