The actual number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is a fact in some dispute. As data from this state, out in the very remote interior part of Central Asia, tends to be awkward to acquire, this might not be all that astonishing. Regardless if there are 2 or 3 legal casinos is the item at issue, maybe not really the most earth-shaking slice of data that we do not have.
What certainly is true, as it is of the lion’s share of the ex-Russian nations, and absolutely true of those in Asia, is that there will be a good many more not allowed and underground gambling halls. The adjustment to acceptable wagering didn’t encourage all the underground gambling halls to come from the illegal into the legal. So, the controversy regarding the number of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos is a minor one at best: how many approved ones is the element we’re trying to reconcile here.
We are aware that in Bishkek, the capital municipality, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a remarkably unique title, don’t you think?), which has both table games and one armed bandits. We can also find both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. The pair of these offer 26 slots and 11 gaming tables, separated amidst roulette, vingt-et-un, and poker. Given the remarkable likeness in the sq.ft. and layout of these 2 Kyrgyzstan casinos, it might be even more astonishing to find that both share an address. This seems most confounding, so we can likely state that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the legal ones, is limited to 2 members, 1 of them having changed their title recently.
The nation, in common with the majority of the ex-Soviet Union, has experienced something of a rapid conversion to free-enterprise economy. The Wild East, you could say, to allude to the lawless conditions of the Wild West a century and a half ago.
Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are in fact worth going to, therefore, as a piece of anthropological analysis, to see money being bet as a type of collective one-upmanship, the celebrated consumption that Thorstein Veblen spoke about in nineteeth century America.