[ English ]

The complete number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is something in question. As info from this nation, out in the very remote interior area of Central Asia, tends to be awkward to acquire, this may not be all that astonishing. Whether there are 2 or 3 authorized gambling halls is the thing at issue, perhaps not in reality the most earth-shaking piece of information that we do not have.

What will be accurate, as it is of most of the old USSR states, and certainly truthful of those located in Asia, is that there no doubt will be many more not allowed and backdoor gambling dens. The adjustment to authorized gambling did not empower all the underground gambling dens to come from the illegal into the legal. So, the controversy regarding the total number of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos is a minor one at most: how many accredited casinos is the thing we’re trying to resolve here.

We understand that in Bishkek, the capital municipality, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a stunningly unique name, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and video slots. We can also find both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. The pair of these offer 26 one armed bandits and 11 gaming tables, divided between roulette, vingt-et-un, and poker. Given the remarkable likeness in the sq.ft. and setup of these 2 Kyrgyzstan casinos, it might be even more astonishing to see that both share an address. This seems most astonishing, so we can no doubt conclude 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 country, in common with the majority of the ex-USSR, has experienced something of a accelerated adjustment to free-enterprise economy. The Wild East, you might say, to allude to the anarchical circumstances of the Wild West a century and a half ago.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are actually worth checking out, therefore, as a bit of anthropological analysis, to see chips being gambled as a form of social one-upmanship, the conspicuous consumption that Thorstein Veblen wrote about in 19th century u.s..