The actual number of Kyrgyzstan gambling dens is a fact in a little doubt. As information from this country, out in the very most interior area of Central Asia, tends to be difficult to get, this might not be too surprising. Regardless if there are 2 or 3 accredited gambling dens is the thing at issue, perhaps not quite the most all-important article of data that we do not have.
What no doubt will be credible, as it is of the majority of the ex-Soviet nations, and certainly true of those in Asia, is that there certainly is a great many more illegal and alternative gambling dens. The switch to legalized gambling did not empower all the former locations to come from the illegal into the legal. So, the contention over the total amount of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls is a minor one at best: how many authorized ones is the item we are trying to reconcile here.
We know that in Bishkek, the capital city, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a stunningly unique name, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and video slots. We can additionally see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Both of these contain 26 one armed bandits and 11 gaming tables, split amidst roulette, 21, and poker. Given the amazing likeness in the size and layout of these two Kyrgyzstan casinos, it may be even more surprising to determine that they are at the same address. This seems most difficult to believe, so we can clearly state that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens, at least the legal ones, ends at two members, one of them having altered their name just a while ago.
The country, in common with almost all of the ex-USSR, has experienced something of a rapid change to free-enterprise system. The Wild East, you could say, to refer to the lawless circumstances of the Wild West a century and a half back.
Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are almost certainly worth checking out, therefore, as a piece of anthropological analysis, to see chips being wagered as a form of social one-upmanship, the conspicuous consumption that Thorstein Veblen spoke about in nineteeth century u.s..