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The actual number of Kyrgyzstan casinos is something in question. As information from this nation, out in the very remote central part of Central Asia, often is difficult to achieve, this may not be all that difficult to believe. Whether there are two or three accredited gambling dens is the thing at issue, perhaps not quite the most consequential piece of data that we do not have.
What no doubt will be credible, as it is of the majority of the ex-Russian states, and definitely true of those in Asia, is that there will be a good many more not approved and alternative gambling halls. The change to approved wagering didn’t drive all the underground locations to come away from the illegal into the legal. So, the bickering over the total amount of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos is a tiny one at most: how many approved gambling halls is the item we’re trying to resolve here.
We understand that in Bishkek, the capital municipality, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a marvelously unique name, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and one armed bandits. We will also find both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Both of these offer 26 slot machine games and 11 gaming tables, split between roulette, 21, and poker. Given the remarkable likeness in the sq.ft. and floor plan of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling dens, it might be even more astonishing to find that the casinos are at the same location. This seems most difficult to believe, so we can perhaps determine that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the authorized ones, stops at 2 casinos, 1 of them having altered their title not long ago.
The state, in common with almost all of the ex-USSR, has experienced something of a accelerated adjustment to free-enterprise system. The Wild East, you could say, to reference the chaotic ways of the Wild West an aeon and a half ago.
Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens are in fact worth visiting, therefore, as a bit of social analysis, to see cash being played as a type of collective one-upmanship, the absolute consumption that Thorstein Veblen wrote about in nineteeth century America.
