The complete number of Kyrgyzstan casinos is a fact in some dispute. As data from this country, out in the very remote central section of Central Asia, often is awkward to get, this might not be too astonishing. Whether there are 2 or 3 approved gambling dens is the item at issue, maybe not in fact the most earth-shattering slice of data that we do not have.
What will be true, as it is of many of the ex-Soviet states, and certainly accurate of those located in Asia, is that there certainly is a great many more not legal and bootleg market gambling halls. The change to legalized betting did not encourage all the underground gambling halls to come out of the illegal into the legal. So, the debate over the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens is a minor one at best: how many accredited ones is the thing we are attempting to answer here.
We know that in Bishkek, the capital city, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a spectacularly original title, don’t you think?), which has both table games and one armed bandits. We can also find both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. The two of these contain 26 slots and 11 gaming tables, split between roulette, 21, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the square footage and floor plan of these two Kyrgyzstan casinos, it might be even more surprising to find that both are at the same location. This appears most bewildering, so we can perhaps state that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos, at least the approved ones, stops at two members, 1 of them having altered their name a short while ago.
The state, in common with practically all of the ex-USSR, has experienced something of a fast conversion to free-enterprise system. The Wild East, you could say, to allude to the anarchical ways of the Wild West an aeon and a half ago.
Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens are in fact worth going to, therefore, as a bit of anthropological research, to see cash being gambled as a form of collective one-upmanship, the celebrated consumption that Thorstein Veblen wrote about in 19th century us of a.
