The complete number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is a fact in some dispute. As information from this country, out in the very remote interior section of Central Asia, often is hard to receive, this may not be too surprising. Whether there are 2 or 3 approved gambling dens is the thing at issue, perhaps not in fact the most earth-shattering bit of data that we don’t have.

What will be accurate, as it is of the majority of the ex-Soviet states, and absolutely true of those located in Asia, is that there no doubt will be a good many more not approved and underground casinos. The change to authorized gaming did not empower all the former locations to come away from the dark into the light. So, the controversy regarding the total number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls is a tiny one at most: how many legal ones is the thing we’re trying to reconcile here.

We are aware 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 slots. We will also find both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Each of these contain 26 video slots and 11 gaming tables, separated amidst roulette, twenty-one, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the size and floor plan of these 2 Kyrgyzstan gambling dens, it may be even more astonishing to determine that both are at the same address. This seems most astonishing, so we can perhaps state that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos, at least the accredited ones, stops at two members, 1 of them having adjusted their title recently.

The country, in common with most of the ex-USSR, has experienced something of a fast adjustment to free-enterprise system. The Wild East, you may say, to refer to the lawless ways of the Wild West a century and a half back.

Kyrgyzstan’s casinos are certainly worth going to, therefore, as a bit of anthropological analysis, to see cash being bet as a type of communal one-upmanship, the aristocratic consumption that Thorstein Veblen spoke about in 19th century us of a.