The complete number of Kyrgyzstan casinos is something in some dispute. As data from this nation, out in the very remote interior area of Central Asia, often is difficult to achieve, this might not be too difficult to believe. Whether there are 2 or three legal gambling halls is the element at issue, perhaps not quite the most all-important piece of data that we don’t have.

What certainly is credible, as it is of the lion’s share of the old USSR nations, and absolutely accurate of those located in Asia, is that there will be a great many more not legal and alternative gambling dens. The change to authorized gambling did not drive all the illegal gambling dens to come from the dark into the light. So, the bickering over the total number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens is a small one at best: how many authorized ones is the item we’re trying to resolve here.

We know that in Bishkek, the capital metropolis, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a spectacularly unique name, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and slot machine games. We can additionally find both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Both of these contain 26 video slots and 11 table games, split amongst roulette, vingt-et-un, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the square footage and floor plan of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling halls, it might be even more astonishing to find that both are at the same address. This seems most unlikely, so we can perhaps state that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the legal ones, ends at 2 members, 1 of them having adjusted their title recently.

The nation, in common with many of the ex-Soviet Union, has undergone something of a fast change to capitalistic system. The Wild East, you might say, to allude to the lawless circumstances of the Wild West a century and a half ago.

Kyrgyzstan’s casinos are in fact worth checking out, therefore, as a piece of social analysis, to see money being gambled as a form of civil one-upmanship, the celebrated consumption that Thorstein Veblen talked about in 19th century u.s..