The conclusive number of Kyrgyzstan gambling dens is a fact in some dispute. As information from this state, out in the very remote central section of Central Asia, can be arduous to achieve, this may not be too difficult to believe. Whether there are 2 or 3 accredited casinos is the item at issue, maybe not in fact the most earth-shattering slice of information that we don’t have.

What no doubt will be accurate, as it is of many of the old Soviet nations, and absolutely accurate of those in Asia, is that there certainly is a lot more not legal and bootleg market gambling halls. The adjustment to approved gambling didn’t empower all the underground places to come out of the illegal into the legal. So, the bickering over the number of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos is a minor one at best: how many accredited gambling dens is the item we’re seeking to reconcile here.

We are aware that in Bishkek, the capital metropolis, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a spectacularly original name, don’t you think?), which has both table games and one armed bandits. We can also find both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. The pair of these have 26 slot machines and 11 gaming tables, separated amidst roulette, twenty-one, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the square footage and setup of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling dens, it may be even more bizarre to determine that both are at the same address. This seems most astonishing, so we can perhaps state that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the approved ones, stops at 2 members, 1 of them having altered their name recently.

The state, in common with almost all of the ex-USSR, has undergone something of a rapid change to commercialism. The Wild East, you could say, to refer to the anarchical ways of the Wild West a century and a half back.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are in fact worth checking out, therefore, as a bit of social research, to see dollars being gambled as a form of communal one-upmanship, the aristocratic consumption that Thorstein Veblen wrote about in nineteeth century America.