[ English ]

The complete number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is a fact in question. As information from this country, out in the very remote interior section of Central Asia, can be hard to get, this might not be all that surprising. Regardless if there are two or 3 legal casinos is the item at issue, maybe not really the most all-important article of information that we do not have.

What no doubt will be credible, as it is of many of the ex-USSR nations, and definitely accurate of those located in Asia, is that there certainly is many more illegal and clandestine gambling halls. The switch to legalized betting did not encourage all the underground locations to come from the illegal into the legal. So, the contention over the total number of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos is a tiny one at most: how many approved ones is the element we’re seeking to resolve here.

We know that in Bishkek, the capital municipality, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a spectacularly unique name, don’t you think?), which has both table games and slots. We can also see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Both of these contain 26 slot machine games and 11 table games, separated amongst roulette, twenty-one, and poker. Given the amazing likeness in the square footage and setup of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling halls, it may be even more astonishing to determine that they share an location. This appears most astonishing, so we can perhaps conclude that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens, at least the legal ones, is limited to 2 members, one of them having changed their title a short time ago.

The country, in common with practically all of the ex-Soviet Union, has experienced something of a fast conversion to capitalistic system. The Wild East, you may say, to allude to the lawless conditions of the Wild West a century and a half ago.

Kyrgyzstan’s casinos are in fact worth checking out, therefore, as a piece of social research, to see cash being gambled as a type of communal one-upmanship, the absolute consumption that Thorstein Veblen talked about in 19th century us of a.