The conclusive number of Kyrgyzstan gambling dens is something in some dispute. As info from this nation, out in the very remote interior area of Central Asia, can be arduous to get, this may not be all that difficult to believe. Whether there are two or 3 approved gambling dens is the thing at issue, maybe not really the most earth-shattering piece of data that we don’t have.

What certainly is true, as it is of the lion’s share of the old Soviet nations, and definitely truthful of those in Asia, is that there will be a good many more illegal and backdoor gambling halls. The switch to approved gambling didn’t drive all the former locations to come out of the dark and become legitimate. So, the battle regarding the number of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos is a small one at most: how many approved ones is the thing we are trying to reconcile here.

We know that in Bishkek, the capital metropolis, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a stunningly unique name, don’t you think?), which has both table games and one armed bandits. We can also find both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Each of these have 26 slot machines and 11 table games, separated amidst roulette, twenty-one, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the sq.ft. and layout of these 2 Kyrgyzstan gambling dens, it might be even more astonishing to find that the casinos share an address. This seems most difficult to believe, so we can perhaps determine that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos, at least the authorized ones, is limited to 2 members, 1 of them having altered their name recently.

The country, in common with nearly all of the ex-USSR, has experienced something of a rapid change to capitalistic system. The Wild East, you could say, to allude to the anarchical conditions of the Wild West a century and a half back.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are certainly worth checking out, therefore, as a piece of anthropological research, to see dollars being played as a form of collective one-upmanship, the aristocratic consumption that Thorstein Veblen spoke about in 19th century u.s.a..