It began as a whim, a way for a teenage boy to occasionally break the monotony of life in notoriously staid Singapore. While other youngsters his age focused on sports or their studies, Sim Cheng Ho took a cue from his father and put in regular appearances at the Singapore Turf Club, placing small bets on horse races. He was lured back again and again by the raucous atmosphere, the thunder of the horses' hooves as they rounded the track, but most of all by the chance, however remote, he might get lucky.
'I didn't have any other hobbies to keep me busy,' Sim, 40, recalls. '[The races] were the only thing that provided me with any excitement or satisfaction.'
Twenty-five years later, Sim's greatest pleasure has proved to be his undoing. His youthful affection for gambling rapidly spiralled into full-blown addiction and he's racked up losses in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. Much of his adult life has been spent mired in debt to friends, banks and underground bookmakers. His hobby has taken a heavy toll on his marketing career and his marriage, with only his mother's interventions preventing his wife from carrying out her threats to pack up their two children and leave. Few of his relatives have any faith in him.
'When I don't come home right after work, they think I'm somewhere gambling,' Sim says. 'If they see my mood is down, their first impression is that I've lost a lot of money and don't know how I'm going to pay off my debts again.'
'I know I've caused a lot of worry to the people around me,' he adds, sighing. 'But I was always trying to recover what I'd lost through more gambling, and that's why I couldn't give up.'
Stories like Sim's stand out in Singapore, where gambling, like many other vices, has been rigorously suppressed. But that is about to change; in 2005, the government announced the lifting of the city-state's decades-old ban on casinos. Last year, it appointed consortia led by a couple of the industry's brighter stars - Las Vegas Sands and Genting International - to build two 'integrated resorts' with gaming facilities by 2009.
Speaking about the decision, Prime Minister Lee Hsein Loong acknowledged that when the casinos opened the punters wouldn't be the only people taking risks. Gambling, he said, could not only undermine Singapore's generally conservative values but also threaten the city's most valuable asset - its reputation as a 'clean, honest [and] wholesome place to live'.