The conclusive number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is a fact in a little doubt. As information from this country, out in the very most interior area of Central Asia, can be difficult to acquire, this might not be all that surprising. Whether there are 2 or 3 legal gambling dens is the item at issue, maybe not really the most all-important piece of information that we don’t have.
What no doubt will be true, as it is of most of the ex-USSR states, and certainly correct of those in Asia, is that there no doubt will be a good many more not allowed and bootleg market gambling dens. The change to acceptable gaming did not encourage all the aforestated places to come from the dark into the light. So, the controversy over the number of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos is a small one at best: how many approved casinos is the element we’re trying to reconcile here.
We know that located in Bishkek, the capital municipality, there is the Casino Las Vegas (an amazingly original name, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and slots. We can also see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Each of these contain 26 one armed bandits and 11 gaming tables, separated amongst roulette, twenty-one, and poker. Given the amazing likeness in the sq.ft. and layout of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling halls, it may be even more astonishing to find that the casinos share an address. This seems most difficult to believe, so we can likely conclude that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens, at least the legal ones, stops at two members, one of them having adjusted their title recently.
The nation, in common with most of the ex-USSR, has undergone something of a rapid conversion to free-enterprise economy. The Wild East, you could say, to refer to the anarchical conditions of the Wild West a century and a half back.
Kyrgyzstan’s casinos are almost certainly worth going to, therefore, as a piece of anthropological analysis, to see chips being bet as a type of collective one-upmanship, the conspicuous consumption that Thorstein Veblen spoke about in nineteeth century usa.