The complete number of Kyrgyzstan gambling dens is something in a little doubt. As information from this country, out in the very most central part of Central Asia, tends to be hard to achieve, this might not be all that difficult to believe. Whether there are 2 or 3 approved casinos is the element at issue, maybe not quite the most consequential article of data that we do not have.
What no doubt will be accurate, as it is of many of the old USSR states, and absolutely correct of those in Asia, is that there will be a good many more not allowed and clandestine casinos. The change to authorized betting didn’t encourage all the underground places to come from the illegal into the legal. So, the clash regarding the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls is a small one at best: how many approved gambling halls is the element we are trying to reconcile here.
We know that in Bishkek, the capital municipality, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a remarkably original name, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and video slots. We can also see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Each of these contain 26 video slots and 11 gaming tables, split amidst roulette, twenty-one, and poker. Given the remarkable likeness in the size and layout of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling halls, it might be even more astonishing to find that both share an address. This appears most strange, so we can clearly state that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the authorized ones, ends at 2 casinos, one of them having changed their title not long ago.
The nation, in common with practically all of the ex-Soviet Union, has undergone something of a accelerated change to free-enterprise economy. The Wild East, you might say, to refer to the anarchical conditions of the Wild West a century and a half back.
Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens are almost certainly worth checking out, therefore, as a piece of anthropological analysis, to see cash being wagered as a type of social one-upmanship, the conspicuous consumption that Thorstein Veblen wrote about in nineteeth century usa.