[ English ]

The complete number of Kyrgyzstan casinos is a fact in question. As data from this state, out in the very most interior part of Central Asia, tends to be hard to get, this may not be all that astonishing. Regardless if there are two or three approved gambling halls is the thing at issue, perhaps not quite the most earth-shaking slice of data that we don’t have.

What will be credible, as it is of the lion’s share of the ex-USSR states, and definitely true of those in Asia, is that there no doubt will be a great many more not allowed and bootleg market casinos. The change to legalized gaming did not drive all the former places to come away from the illegal into the legal. So, the controversy regarding the total amount of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls is a minor one at best: how many authorized casinos is the element we’re trying to resolve here.

We understand that located in Bishkek, the capital metropolis, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a marvelously original title, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and slots. We can also find both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. The pair of these offer 26 slot machines and 11 table games, separated amidst roulette, blackjack, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the size and floor plan of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling dens, it may be even more surprising to determine that the casinos are at the same location. This seems most strange, so we can likely conclude that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos, at least the approved ones, stops at 2 casinos, one of them having changed their name a short while ago.

The country, in common with nearly all of the ex-Soviet Union, has experienced something of a fast change to free-enterprise economy. The Wild East, you may say, to refer to the anarchical ways of the Wild West a century and a half back.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens are in reality worth going to, therefore, as a piece of anthropological analysis, to see dollars being bet as a type of communal one-upmanship, the celebrated consumption that Thorstein Veblen wrote about in 19th century usa.