WHEN it comes to gambling, Mr Ramachandar Siva prefers to keep a safe distance. Yet the job he took on when he was fresh out of university did not allow him to do that.

In the late 1980s, he joined the Genting casino as a management trainee for what he then considered a princely sum of RM400 (S$166) a month. Jobs were scarce for freshers then and he got the job because the Malaysian government asked private firms to hire students who had been on government scholarships.

Mr Siva, a scholar with a degree in biochemistry, got some offers from firms based in Kuala Lumpur but he chose Genting, simply because he could save on accommodation and food.

The gamble paid off. And today the 46-year-old Malaysian is the CEO of Singapore-based ICG School of Casino and Hospitality Management.

"I had a friend who was working in Genting at that time. I understood from him that by joining the casino group

I would save on travel and wouldn't have to pay for food since I would get duty meals and even 40 ringgit coupons to buy items like toothpaste," he recalls.

Admitting that the management trainee designation was only a glorified name, he had to immediately start working as a croupier. After three months, he was made a supervisor. A year later, he was made an executive. And three years later, he was a manager, being sent all over the world for training.

"They spent about a million dollars (ringgit) on me. Not many wanted to go for overseas seminars and training because our HR department wanted the person to come back and write a paper and implement something related to it. So when the HR pressured senior managers to send someone for such sessions they would ask me "Rama, can you go and when you return, write a report?". I would readily agree and so my managers were happy."

A stint with the HR department allowed him to learn more about training. "We came up with a really good programme called Star Service that prompted my bosses to drag me back to the casino and they requested that I set up a full casino training centre just for casino staff. I came up with a blue print for the casino training facility and programmes that covered all positions from croupier to senior managers, probably a first in the industry the world over," says Mr Siva.

A bigger career break came his way when he was called in to turn around the Star Cruises casino operations.

When Star Cruises suffered major losses in 1997, the owner of the company, who also owns the Genting casino, asked Mr Siva and a colleague to clear up the mess. At that time, Star Cruises was expanding from four ships to 13 ships.

"My CEO Colin Au gave me one instruction: If Eskimos are willing to work for $50, then just hire them, but train them well. I managed the recruitment for crew from 22 countries and hired more than 10,000 people over that period of regrowth," says Mr Siva with pride.

"I provided the casino operations manuals and systems to track productivity which increased the revenue versus operations cost fivefold. Star Cruises was making good money from 2000 to 2002 till 9/11 came about, followed by Sars, blow after blow to an industry relying on international travel."

That also led to Mr Siva leaving the industry. He had been with the Genting group for 17 years, the last seven with Star Cruises as VP of Casino Operations. He says he quit in 2004 to take a two-year break and catch up on developments in IT, his fitness - he was overweight after his stint at Star Cruises - and pursue some hobbies like producing TV shows and racing cars in Sepang.

But a year into his break, some friends in Singapore got wind of the new casinos coming up and mooted the idea of a commercial casino school.

"When they told me about it, I thought they'd had too many drinks, but they persuaded me to put together a proposal, which I completed in June 2005. I didn't really expect it to get approval.

It was just a case of opportunistic brilliance on the part of my friends here and me being the right person available at the right time with a perfectly workable plan," he says.

The institute started in Turf City with certificate courses in 2006 and around 1,600 students have benefited so far. That course has since been discontinued and now it offers only one-year diploma and bachelor's programmes with a tie-up with Leeds Metropolitan University.

When I met Mr Siva recently, he was busy preparing for an education fair. And it meant he would have to miss his weekly trip to his home in Kuala Lumpur, where he normally spends the weekend with his lawyer wife Ramani and their two sons: Kishen, 13, and Jitendra, six.

The boys look forward to dad's arrival every week. The three share photography as a hobby and Kishen makes short films which he uploads on YouTube.

Mr Siva, who is passionate about racing, drives a Lexus which gets him to Kuala Lumpur faster than taking a bus or a plane from Singapore. He has two sports cars - a Toyota MRS and a Celica - in Kuala Lumpur. Sometimes his younger brother, who is based in Kedah, joins him to race in Sepang.

Mr Siva grew up in a rubber plantation in Kedah, where his father was a driver for the estate managers and his mother a midwife in a local hospital. "We were very poor but brought-up decently, in a very English fashion as my parents were Anglophiles. Basically I'm an "estate kampung boy" and would have ended up as a rubber tapper if not for my parents' foresight and ambition to educate me and my four siblings in English schools and not the dilapidated Tamil schools on the estate," he confesses.

He did well in school and was the only non-Malay to be offered a place in a special boarding school for gifted Malay students. His four siblings, a brother and three sisters, also graduated with government scholarships.

Mr Siva, who represented Malaysia in the junior hockey team, these days plays badminton with his sons or goes out bowling with them.

He also embarks on spontaneous family trips to Asean resorts. "This has been made easy by the budget airlines. All you need is good company," he says. And that is something that is never in short supply when he has his supportive wife and sons, who adore him, by his side.