[ English ]

The confirmed number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is a fact in some dispute. As info from this country, out in the very remote interior part of Central Asia, tends to be arduous to achieve, this may not be too difficult to believe. Regardless if there are 2 or 3 accredited gambling halls is the thing at issue, perhaps not really the most consequential slice of information that we do not have.

What will be accurate, as it is of the lion’s share of the ex-Russian nations, and definitely accurate of those in Asia, is that there will be many more illegal and clandestine casinos. The change to legalized gambling didn’t energize all the illegal places to come away from the illegal into the legal. So, the bickering over the total amount of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls is a minor one at best: how many authorized gambling halls is the item we are trying to answer here.

We are aware that in Bishkek, the capital city, there is the Casino Las Vegas (an amazingly unique title, don’t you think?), which has both table games and slot machines. We will also see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. The two of these have 26 video slots and 11 gaming tables, divided amidst roulette, blackjack, and poker. Given the amazing likeness in the sq.ft. and floor plan of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling dens, it might be even more surprising to see that they are at the same location. This appears most astonishing, so we can perhaps determine that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens, at least the legal ones, ends at two members, 1 of them having altered their title just a while ago.

The country, in common with almost all of the ex-USSR, has experienced something of a rapid adjustment to capitalistic system. The Wild East, you might say, to reference the lawless ways of the Wild West a century and a half back.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are certainly worth going to, therefore, as a piece of anthropological research, to see dollars being wagered as a form of civil one-upmanship, the conspicuous consumption that Thorstein Veblen wrote about in nineteeth century America.