The confirmed number of Kyrgyzstan gambling dens is a fact in some dispute. As data from this nation, out in the very remote interior section of Central Asia, tends to be difficult to receive, this may not be too difficult to believe. Whether there are 2 or 3 accredited gambling halls is the item at issue, perhaps not really the most earth-shattering piece of data that we do not have.
What certainly is credible, as it is of most of the ex-USSR nations, and certainly true of those in Asia, is that there no doubt will be a good many more not approved and backdoor casinos. The switch to acceptable betting didn’t encourage all the aforestated locations to come away from the illegal into the legal. So, the bickering regarding the total number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls is a small one at most: how many legal ones is the thing we are attempting to resolve here.
We understand that in Bishkek, the capital city, there is the Casino Las Vegas (an amazingly original name, don’t you think?), which has both table games and slot machines. We will also see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Both of these have 26 one armed bandits and 11 table games, split between roulette, 21, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the size and layout of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling dens, it might be even more bizarre to find that the casinos are at the same location. This seems most confounding, so we can perhaps determine that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos, at least the accredited ones, stops at 2 casinos, 1 of them having altered their title a short while ago.
The nation, in common with practically all of the ex-USSR, has experienced something of a rapid conversion to free market. The Wild East, you could say, to allude to the lawless ways of the Wild West an aeon and a half back.
Kyrgyzstan’s casinos are in reality worth visiting, therefore, as a piece of anthropological research, to see money being gambled as a form of communal one-upmanship, the apparent consumption that Thorstein Veblen talked about in 19th century u.s.a..