The actual number of Kyrgyzstan casinos is a fact in some dispute. As info from this country, out in the very most interior part of Central Asia, tends to be hard to receive, this may not be too difficult to believe. Whether there are 2 or 3 legal gambling dens is the item at issue, perhaps not quite the most earth-shattering slice of data that we do not have.
What certainly is correct, as it is of many of the ex-Soviet nations, and definitely true of those in Asia, is that there will be a great many more not legal and bootleg market casinos. The change to acceptable gaming didn’t empower all the aforestated places to come out of the illegal into the legal. So, the battle regarding the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls is a small one at most: how many authorized ones is the element we’re trying to answer here.
We understand that in Bishkek, the capital metropolis, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a spectacularly original name, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and slots. We will also see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Each of these offer 26 slot machine games and 11 table games, split amidst roulette, twenty-one, and poker. Given the amazing similarity in the sq.ft. and layout of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling dens, it may be even more surprising to see that the casinos are at the same address. This seems most difficult to believe, so we can likely determine that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos, at least the legal ones, stops at two casinos, one of them having changed their name just a while ago.
The nation, in common with almost all of the ex-Soviet Union, has undergone something of a accelerated conversion to capitalism. The Wild East, you may say, to reference the chaotic circumstances of the Wild West a century and a half back.
Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are certainly worth checking out, therefore, as a piece of anthropological research, to see chips being gambled as a type of social one-upmanship, the conspicuous consumption that Thorstein Veblen wrote about in nineteeth century America.