[ English ]

The actual number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is a fact in a little doubt. As info from this country, out in the very remote central part of Central Asia, often is arduous to get, this may not be too astonishing. Whether there are two or three approved gambling halls is the thing at issue, perhaps not in fact the most earth-shattering bit of info that we don’t have.

What will be accurate, as it is of the lion’s share of the old USSR nations, and certainly true of those located in Asia, is that there will be a lot more not legal and underground gambling dens. The change to authorized betting didn’t encourage all the illegal gambling dens to come from the dark and become legitimate. So, the debate over the number of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos is a minor one at most: how many accredited ones is the element we’re trying to resolve here.

We know that located in Bishkek, the capital municipality, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a marvelously original title, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and slot machine games. We can also see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. The pair of these contain 26 video slots and 11 table games, separated amongst roulette, chemin de fer, and poker. Given the amazing likeness in the square footage and layout of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling halls, it might be even more bizarre to see that the casinos are at the same location. This appears most difficult to believe, so we can clearly determine that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the authorized ones, ends at two members, 1 of them having changed their name recently.

The nation, in common with many of the ex-Soviet Union, has experienced something of a fast conversion to capitalistic system. The Wild East, you may say, to reference the anarchical conditions of the Wild West an aeon and a half ago.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are almost certainly worth visiting, therefore, as a bit of anthropological analysis, to see money being gambled as a type of social one-upmanship, the celebrated consumption that Thorstein Veblen spoke about in 19th century u.s.a..