The complete number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is a fact in question. As data from this country, out in the very most interior section of Central Asia, can be awkward to get, this may not be all that surprising. Whether there are 2 or 3 approved gambling halls is the thing at issue, maybe not in reality the most consequential piece of data that we do not have.
What no doubt will be true, as it is of most of the old Soviet states, and certainly accurate of those located in Asia, is that there certainly is a lot more not approved and alternative casinos. The switch to authorized gaming didn’t energize all the former places to come from the dark into the light. So, the contention over the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens is a small one at best: how many approved ones is the element we are attempting to resolve here.
We know that in Bishkek, the capital city, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a spectacularly original name, don’t you think?), which has both table games and slot machine games. We can additionally see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Each of these contain 26 one armed bandits and 11 table games, split between roulette, 21, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the size and floor plan of these 2 Kyrgyzstan gambling dens, it may be even more surprising to see that they share an address. This seems most astonishing, so we can no doubt conclude that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens, at least the legal ones, stops at 2 casinos, 1 of them having changed their name a short time ago.
The nation, in common with the majority of the ex-Soviet Union, has experienced something of a accelerated adjustment to capitalism. The Wild East, you might say, to refer to the chaotic ways of the Wild West an aeon and a half ago.
Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are certainly worth visiting, therefore, as a piece of anthropological research, to see money being gambled as a type of social one-upmanship, the absolute consumption that Thorstein Veblen spoke about in nineteeth century America.
