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.
Singapore's Marina Bay Sands and Resorts World Sentosa casinos have also created over 50,000 jobs. In 2010, the first year of the casinos, spending by visitors to the city-state surged by 49% from the year before, largely attributed to the gambling dens.
By 2015, Asia-Pacific gamblers are set to overtake those in the United States, according to corporate consultants PricewaterhouseCoopers, with an estimated 43.4% of the world's wagers hitting the tables in Macao, Singapore and other regional venues, against 40.1% in the US.
Worldwide gaming revenues will reach 182.8 billion dollars that year, the consultancy said, up 55% from 2010.
The Philippines and Japan have also expressed interest in becoming major gambling venues. A Citibank study estimated that Japan has the potential for 15 billion dollars annually of - taxable - gambling revenues.
Singapore's leaders took some time to warm to the idea of casinos, fearing that they would besmirch the city’s clean-living image.
"I said no, no, don't do that," founding father and senior statesman Lee Kuan Yew said in 2009 of his earlier resistance to the idea. "You'll bring mafias here and money laundering and all kinds of crime."
But then Lee said he saw the growth of gambling all over the world and realised he had to change his mind or "be out of business.“ So the approval for two casinos was made.
The move has not completely stripped the "nanny-state" image of the island, where the state monitors many aspect of residents' lives and strictly forbids many behaviours seen as lifestyle choices elsewhere, such as sex between men or spitting chewing gum on the street.
Still now the term "casino" is not officially used, and to prevent gambling addiction, its own citizens are charged 100 Singapore dollars to enter the "integrated holiday facilities."
The system also blacklists those who volunteer as having gambling problems - or are volunteered as such by family members - as well as anyone receiving social benefits. The bans affect almost 50,000 of the five million population.
The boom in Singapore's gambling business has shown signs of levelling off amid weakening regional economies. "The slowdown in economic growth in India and Indonesia could cool gaming demand" from visitors from those two countries, Citibank said, making it "more cautious“ about medium-term growth.
But Singapore is not aiming to outshine Macau, nor is its economy as heavily dependent on the gambling tables. The Chinese enclave relies on its casinos for almost half of its gross domestic product, while in Singapore, the figure is less than 2%.