[ English ]

The confirmed number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is a fact in some dispute. As info from this country, out in the very most interior area of Central Asia, can be awkward to receive, this may not be too surprising. Regardless if there are two or 3 legal gambling dens is the item at issue, maybe not in fact the most earth-shaking article of information that we don’t have.

What certainly is true, as it is of the majority of the ex-Soviet nations, and definitely correct of those located in Asia, is that there no doubt will be a good many more not allowed and underground casinos. The change to legalized betting didn’t encourage all the underground locations to come away from the illegal into the legal. So, the clash regarding the total amount of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos is a minor one at best: how many legal gambling dens is the element we are seeking to resolve here.

We are aware that located in Bishkek, the capital metropolis, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a spectacularly unique title, don’t you think?), which has both table games and video slots. We will also find both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. The pair of these offer 26 slot machine games and 11 table games, separated amidst roulette, twenty-one, and poker. Given the remarkable likeness in the square footage and floor plan of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling halls, it may be even more bizarre to determine that both share an address. This appears most strange, so we can no doubt state that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the legal ones, is limited to two members, one of them having altered their name a short while ago.

The country, in common with most of the ex-USSR, has experienced something of a rapid adjustment to capitalistic system. The Wild East, you might say, to reference the chaotic circumstances of the Wild West a century and a half back.

Kyrgyzstan’s casinos are actually worth going to, therefore, as a piece of anthropological research, to see chips being gambled as a form of communal one-upmanship, the apparent consumption that Thorstein Veblen talked about in nineteeth century usa.