The complete number of Kyrgyzstan gambling dens is something in a little doubt. As info from this country, out in the very remote central area of Central Asia, often is arduous to get, this might not be too astonishing. Whether there are 2 or 3 approved gambling dens is the element at issue, perhaps not quite the most consequential slice of information that we do not have.
What will be correct, as it is of the majority of the old USSR nations, and absolutely true of those located in Asia, is that there no doubt will be a lot more not approved and underground gambling dens. The switch to approved betting did not empower all the underground gambling halls to come from the illegal into the legal. So, the battle over the total number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens is a tiny one at best: how many legal ones is the thing we’re trying to answer here.
We know that located in Bishkek, the capital metropolis, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a marvelously original title, don’t you think?), which has both table games and slot machines. We can also see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. The two of these contain 26 slot machine games and 11 gaming tables, separated amidst roulette, blackjack, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the square footage and floor plan of these two Kyrgyzstan casinos, it might be even more bizarre to find that they are at the same address. This seems most confounding, so we can perhaps conclude that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens, at least the legal ones, is limited to 2 members, 1 of them having adjusted their name not long ago.
The country, in common with the majority of the ex-Soviet Union, has undergone something of a fast conversion to capitalistic system. The Wild East, you may say, to reference the anarchical ways of the Wild West an aeon and a half ago.
Kyrgyzstan’s casinos are in fact worth checking out, therefore, as a bit of anthropological research, to see cash being gambled as a type of social one-upmanship, the absolute consumption that Thorstein Veblen wrote about in nineteeth century America.
