[ English ]

The complete number of Kyrgyzstan gambling dens is a fact in a little doubt. As data from this nation, out in the very most interior part of Central Asia, tends to be awkward to acquire, this might not be too astonishing. Whether there are two or 3 legal gambling dens is the item at issue, maybe not in reality the most earth-shattering article of information that we do not have.

What certainly is true, as it is of the lion’s share of the old USSR states, and absolutely accurate of those located in Asia, is that there no doubt will be many more illegal and backdoor gambling halls. The switch to authorized gaming didn’t energize all the aforestated gambling halls to come away from the dark into the light. So, the debate regarding the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls is a minor one at most: how many approved gambling halls is the element we’re seeking to reconcile here.

We know that located in Bishkek, the capital metropolis, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a marvelously original name, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and slots. We can also see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Each of these have 26 slot machine games and 11 table games, separated amidst roulette, twenty-one, and poker. Given the remarkable likeness in the square footage and layout of these two Kyrgyzstan casinos, it might be even more surprising to find that both are at the same address. This appears most confounding, so we can no doubt determine that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens, at least the legal ones, is limited to 2 members, 1 of them having changed their name not long ago.

The country, in common with almost all of the ex-USSR, has experienced something of a rapid change to free-enterprise system. The Wild East, you could say, to reference the anarchical conditions of the Wild West a century and a half back.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are in reality worth visiting, therefore, as a piece of social research, to see cash being bet as a form of social one-upmanship, the conspicuous consumption that Thorstein Veblen talked about in 19th century u.s..