The actual number of Kyrgyzstan casinos is a fact in some dispute. As data from this nation, out in the very most interior area of Central Asia, often is difficult to get, this might not be too difficult to believe. Whether there are 2 or three accredited gambling dens is the element at issue, perhaps not quite the most consequential piece of information that we don’t have.
What will be accurate, as it is of the lion’s share of the ex-USSR nations, and definitely accurate of those located in Asia, is that there no doubt will be a great many more not approved and alternative gambling halls. The change to acceptable betting did not encourage all the former places to come out of the illegal into the legal. So, the clash over the number of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos is a minor one at most: how many accredited gambling halls is the thing we are trying to reconcile here.
We know that located in Bishkek, the capital municipality, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a marvelously unique title, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and slot machine games. We can also find both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Both of these contain 26 one armed bandits and 11 gaming tables, divided amongst roulette, twenty-one, and poker. Given the amazing likeness in the sq.ft. and floor plan of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling halls, it might be even more bizarre to see that the casinos are at the same location. This seems most astonishing, so we can likely determine that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens, at least the legal ones, stops at 2 members, 1 of them having changed their title a short time ago.
The country, in common with most of the ex-Soviet Union, has experienced something of a accelerated conversion to free-enterprise economy. The Wild East, you might say, to reference the anarchical ways of the Wild West an aeon and a half ago.
Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are in fact worth checking out, therefore, as a bit of anthropological research, to see cash being played as a form of collective one-upmanship, the aristocratic consumption that Thorstein Veblen spoke about in nineteeth century America.
