The actual number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is a fact in a little doubt. As information from this state, out in the very remote central area of Central Asia, can be difficult to get, this might not be all that astonishing. Whether there are two or three approved casinos is the element at issue, perhaps not quite the most earth-shaking slice of data that we don’t have.
What will be true, as it is of most of the ex-Soviet states, and definitely accurate of those located in Asia, is that there certainly is a great many more not legal and underground gambling halls. The adjustment to acceptable wagering didn’t energize all the illegal places to come from the illegal into the legal. So, the debate regarding the total amount of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens is a small one at most: how many approved gambling halls is the element we are trying to reconcile here.
We know that in Bishkek, the capital city, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a stunningly original name, 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 two of these offer 26 slot machine games and 11 gaming tables, separated amidst roulette, twenty-one, and poker. Given the amazing similarity in the sq.ft. and setup of these two Kyrgyzstan casinos, it might be even more astonishing to see that both are at the same address. This seems most strange, so we can no doubt determine that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos, at least the authorized ones, is limited to two members, one of them having altered their title just a while ago.
The state, in common with almost all of the ex-Soviet Union, has undergone something of a fast adjustment to free-enterprise economy. The Wild East, you may say, to allude to the lawless circumstances of the Wild West a century and a half ago.
Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are almost certainly worth going to, therefore, as a piece of social research, to see chips being gambled as a type of communal one-upmanship, the celebrated consumption that Thorstein Veblen spoke about in nineteeth century u.s.a..