The complete number of Kyrgyzstan casinos is something in question. As details from this country, out in the very remote interior section of Central Asia, tends to be hard to get, this might not be all that surprising. Regardless if there are 2 or three approved gambling halls is the element at issue, maybe not in reality the most all-important article of information that we don’t have.
What certainly is accurate, as it is of the lion’s share of the old USSR nations, and absolutely true of those in Asia, is that there no doubt will be many more not legal and alternative casinos. The change to legalized betting did not energize all the underground places to come from the illegal into the legal. So, the controversy over the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls is a small one at most: how many legal ones is the element we are seeking to resolve here.
We know that located in Bishkek, the capital city, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a stunningly unique name, don’t you think?), which has both table games and slots. We can also find both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Both of these offer 26 slot machines and 11 gaming tables, split between roulette, chemin de fer, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the sq.ft. and setup of these 2 Kyrgyzstan gambling halls, it might be even more bizarre to see that the casinos share an address. This seems most bewildering, so we can no doubt conclude that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens, at least the authorized ones, is limited to two members, one of them having altered their name a short time ago.
The country, in common with almost all of the ex-USSR, has undergone something of a fast conversion to commercialism. The Wild East, you might say, to refer to the lawless ways of the Wild West a century and a half back.
Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens are in fact worth visiting, therefore, as a bit of social analysis, to see money being wagered as a form of civil one-upmanship, the aristocratic consumption that Thorstein Veblen talked about in 19th century us of a.