[ English ]

The complete number of Kyrgyzstan gambling dens is a fact in a little doubt. As info from this state, out in the very remote interior area of Central Asia, tends to be hard to acquire, this may not be too difficult to believe. Regardless if there are 2 or 3 accredited gambling halls is the thing at issue, maybe not quite the most consequential piece of information that we don’t have.

What will be true, as it is of many of the ex-Russian states, and absolutely true of those located in Asia, is that there certainly is many more not allowed and underground gambling halls. The switch to acceptable wagering didn’t energize all the underground places to come out of the illegal into the legal. So, the controversy regarding the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens is a small one at most: how many approved ones is the element we are attempting to resolve here.

We are aware that in Bishkek, the capital metropolis, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a marvelously original title, don’t you think?), which has both table games and slots. We can additionally see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Both of these contain 26 video slots and 11 table games, split between roulette, chemin de fer, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the sq.ft. and setup of these two Kyrgyzstan casinos, it may be even more astonishing to find that they share an address. This seems most difficult to believe, so we can likely conclude that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the authorized ones, is limited to two members, 1 of them having changed their name recently.

The nation, in common with almost all of the ex-USSR, has experienced something of a rapid change to free-enterprise economy. The Wild East, you could say, to reference the lawless circumstances of the Wild West a century and a half ago.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens are certainly worth checking out, therefore, as a piece of anthropological analysis, to see money being wagered as a type of communal one-upmanship, the conspicuous consumption that Thorstein Veblen spoke about in nineteeth century America.