The actual number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is a fact in a little doubt. As details from this state, out in the very remote interior area of Central Asia, can be hard to acquire, this might not be all that astonishing. Whether there are 2 or three approved gambling dens is the thing at issue, maybe not really the most all-important piece of information that we don’t have.
What no doubt will be correct, as it is of many of the old USSR nations, and absolutely correct of those in Asia, is that there will be a lot more not approved and alternative gambling halls. The switch to approved gambling didn’t energize all the former locations to come from the dark into the light. So, the debate regarding the total number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens is a tiny one at most: how many authorized gambling halls is the element we are seeking to resolve here.
We know that in Bishkek, the capital municipality, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a marvelously unique name, don’t you think?), which has both table games and slot machine games. We will also see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. The pair of these contain 26 slot machine games and 11 table games, separated between roulette, 21, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the square footage and floor plan of these 2 Kyrgyzstan gambling dens, it may be even more surprising to find that both are at the same address. This seems most astonishing, so we can perhaps state that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos, at least the accredited ones, is limited to 2 members, one of them having changed their title a short while ago.
The country, in common with almost all of the ex-Soviet Union, has experienced something of a accelerated conversion to free market. The Wild East, you may say, to allude to the anarchical conditions of the Wild West a century and a half back.
Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are certainly worth checking out, therefore, as a bit of anthropological research, to see dollars being wagered as a type of communal one-upmanship, the apparent consumption that Thorstein Veblen talked about in nineteeth century u.s..