[ English ]

The actual number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is something in a little doubt. As information from this nation, out in the very remote interior part of Central Asia, tends to be hard to get, this might not be all that difficult to believe. Regardless if there are 2 or 3 accredited casinos is the item at issue, maybe not quite the most earth-shattering bit of data that we do not have.

What will be correct, as it is of many of the ex-Soviet states, and definitely correct of those in Asia, is that there no doubt will be many more not legal and backdoor gambling dens. The change to legalized betting did not empower all the illegal casinos to come out of the dark into the light. So, the controversy over the total number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls is a minor one at best: how many authorized ones is the item we are attempting to reconcile here.

We understand that in Bishkek, the capital city, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a stunningly unique 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. Each of these have 26 slot machine games and 11 table games, split between roulette, 21, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the square footage and floor plan of these 2 Kyrgyzstan gambling dens, it may be even more astonishing to determine that the casinos are at the same address. This seems most confounding, so we can no doubt state that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the legal ones, stops at two casinos, 1 of them having altered their title recently.

The state, in common with almost all of the ex-Soviet Union, has undergone something of a rapid adjustment to free-enterprise system. The Wild East, you might say, to refer to the chaotic ways of the Wild West a century and a half ago.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens are in fact worth checking out, therefore, as a piece of social research, to see dollars being gambled as a type of collective one-upmanship, the conspicuous consumption that Thorstein Veblen talked about in nineteeth century us of a.