[ English ]

The actual number of Kyrgyzstan casinos is a fact in question. As data from this country, out in the very remote interior section of Central Asia, tends to be arduous to receive, this may not be too difficult to believe. Whether there are two or three legal gambling dens is the thing at issue, maybe not in reality the most earth-shaking article of info that we do not have.

What no doubt will be accurate, as it is of many of the ex-Russian nations, and certainly true of those located in Asia, is that there certainly is many more illegal and backdoor casinos. The change to approved gambling didn’t energize all the illegal places to come away from the dark into the light. So, the battle over the total number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls is a tiny one at best: how many accredited ones is the element we’re trying to answer here.

We are aware that in Bishkek, the capital metropolis, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a remarkably unique title, don’t you think?), which has both table games and slot machine games. We will also see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. The two of these offer 26 slot machines and 11 table games, divided amongst roulette, twenty-one, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the square footage and floor plan of these 2 Kyrgyzstan casinos, it may be even more surprising to see that both are at the same location. This seems most bewildering, so we can likely determine that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the authorized ones, is limited to 2 members, 1 of them having changed their name a short time ago.

The country, in common with practically all of the ex-Soviet Union, has experienced something of a rapid conversion to commercialism. The Wild East, you could say, to allude to the chaotic ways of the Wild West an aeon and a half ago.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are in fact worth visiting, therefore, as a piece of anthropological analysis, to see money being bet as a type of collective one-upmanship, the absolute consumption that Thorstein Veblen talked about in nineteeth century u.s.a..