[ English ]

The confirmed number of Kyrgyzstan casinos is a fact in question. As info from this country, out in the very remote interior part of Central Asia, can be hard to get, this may not be all that astonishing. Whether there are 2 or 3 accredited casinos is the item at issue, maybe not really the most earth-shattering bit of info that we don’t have.

What no doubt will be true, as it is of the majority of the ex-USSR nations, and absolutely correct of those in Asia, is that there will be a great many more not legal and clandestine casinos. The change to authorized wagering didn’t empower all the underground places to come from the dark into the light. So, the clash over the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls is a small one at most: how many accredited gambling dens is the thing we are attempting to answer here.

We are aware that located in Bishkek, the capital municipality, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a marvelously original name, don’t you think?), which has both table games and slots. We will also find both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. The two of these have 26 slot machine games and 11 table games, split between roulette, chemin de fer, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the size and floor plan of these 2 Kyrgyzstan casinos, it might be even more bizarre to see that the casinos are at the same address. This appears most strange, so we can no doubt determine that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the legal ones, stops at two members, 1 of them having changed their name a short time ago.

The state, in common with most of the ex-Soviet Union, has experienced something of a fast conversion to capitalistic system. The Wild East, you might say, to refer to the chaotic circumstances of the Wild West an aeon and a half back.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens are actually worth going to, therefore, as a piece of anthropological analysis, to see money being gambled as a form of communal one-upmanship, the apparent consumption that Thorstein Veblen spoke about in nineteeth century America.