[ English ]

The confirmed number of Kyrgyzstan casinos is a fact in a little doubt. As data from this state, out in the very remote interior section of Central Asia, often is awkward to achieve, this may not be all that bizarre. Regardless if there are two or 3 legal gambling halls is the item at issue, perhaps not quite the most all-important piece of data that we do not have.

What will be credible, as it is of most of the old Soviet states, and certainly accurate of those in Asia, is that there will be a great many more not legal and clandestine gambling halls. The adjustment to legalized gaming did not empower all the former places to come out of the dark and become legitimate. So, the battle over the total amount of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens is a small one at most: how many approved ones is the thing we’re attempting to reconcile here.

We are aware that in Bishkek, the capital city, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a spectacularly unique 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. Each of these contain 26 slots and 11 gaming tables, split between roulette, twenty-one, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the size and layout of these 2 Kyrgyzstan gambling dens, it might be even more astonishing to see that both are at the same location. This appears most astonishing, so we can no doubt state that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the accredited ones, stops at two casinos, 1 of them having altered their title recently.

The nation, in common with many of the ex-Soviet Union, has experienced something of a accelerated change to free market. The Wild East, you could say, to allude to the chaotic ways of the Wild West an aeon and a half ago.

Kyrgyzstan’s casinos are actually worth checking out, therefore, as a piece of anthropological analysis, to see cash being gambled as a form of communal one-upmanship, the absolute consumption that Thorstein Veblen spoke about in 19th century us of a.