[ English ]

The complete number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is something in question. As information from this nation, out in the very remote interior section of Central Asia, tends to be hard to receive, this may not be all that astonishing. Whether there are two or three authorized gambling halls is the element at issue, perhaps not quite the most all-important bit of info that we don’t have.

What no doubt will be credible, as it is of the lion’s share of the ex-Soviet nations, and certainly correct of those located in Asia, is that there will be many more illegal and alternative gambling dens. The switch to approved betting did not drive all the aforestated locations to come out of the illegal into the legal. So, the bickering regarding the total number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens is a minor one at most: how many approved ones is the thing we are seeking to resolve here.

We are aware that located in Bishkek, the capital municipality, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a remarkably original name, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and one armed bandits. We will additionally see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. The two of these have 26 video slots and 11 gaming tables, separated amidst roulette, 21, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the size and floor plan of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling halls, it may be even more bizarre to determine that both share an location. This appears most bewildering, so we can perhaps state that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens, at least the legal ones, is limited to two members, 1 of them having changed their title a short while ago.

The nation, in common with practically all of the ex-USSR, has experienced something of a accelerated conversion to capitalism. The Wild East, you could say, to reference the anarchical circumstances of the Wild West a century and a half back.

Kyrgyzstan’s casinos are in fact worth visiting, therefore, as a piece of anthropological analysis, to see cash being bet as a type of civil one-upmanship, the apparent consumption that Thorstein Veblen talked about in 19th century u.s..