The confirmed number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is a fact in some dispute. As information from this state, out in the very remote interior section of Central Asia, often is hard to get, this might not be too difficult to believe. Whether there are 2 or three approved gambling halls is the item at issue, perhaps not in fact the most earth-shattering slice of information that we don’t have.

What no doubt will be accurate, as it is of the majority of the old USSR states, and certainly true of those in Asia, is that there will be many more not approved and underground gambling halls. The change to approved wagering did not drive all the illegal locations to come out of the dark and become legitimate. So, the contention regarding the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens is a tiny one at most: how many approved ones is the element we are attempting to answer here.

We know that in Bishkek, the capital municipality, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a remarkably original title, don’t you think?), which has both table games and slot machine games. We will also see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Both of these contain 26 slot machine games and 11 gaming tables, split between roulette, chemin de fer, and poker. Given the amazing likeness in the square footage and floor plan of these 2 Kyrgyzstan casinos, it might be even more bizarre to see that they are at the same address. This seems most astonishing, so we can clearly determine that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the authorized ones, is limited to two members, 1 of them having altered their title not long ago.

The country, in common with practically all of the ex-Soviet Union, has undergone something of a accelerated change to capitalistic system. The Wild East, you could say, to refer to the anarchical ways 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 wagered as a type of civil one-upmanship, the absolute consumption that Thorstein Veblen wrote about in 19th century us of a.