[ English ]

The conclusive number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is something in a little doubt. As info from this country, out in the very most interior area of Central Asia, often is arduous to receive, this may not be too surprising. Whether there are two or 3 legal casinos is the item at issue, maybe not really the most consequential piece of data that we don’t have.

What no doubt will be credible, as it is of the majority of the old Russian nations, and certainly correct of those in Asia, is that there no doubt will be a lot more not legal and underground gambling dens. The adjustment to legalized betting did not encourage all the aforestated locations to come away from the dark and become legitimate. So, the contention regarding the number of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos is a tiny one at best: how many authorized ones is the element we’re trying to reconcile here.

We are aware that located in Bishkek, the capital metropolis, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a marvelously original title, don’t you think?), which has both table games and slot machine games. We will also find both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Each of these have 26 slot machine games and 11 gaming tables, separated between roulette, twenty-one, and poker. Given the remarkable likeness in the square footage and floor plan of these two Kyrgyzstan casinos, it may be even more astonishing to determine that they are at the same location. This seems most difficult to believe, so we can likely conclude that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens, at least the legal ones, stops at 2 casinos, one of them having altered their name a short while ago.

The country, in common with almost all of the ex-Soviet Union, has experienced something of a fast adjustment to capitalism. The Wild East, you may say, to allude to the anarchical ways of the Wild West a century and a half back.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are certainly worth checking out, therefore, as a piece of anthropological research, to see chips being played as a form of communal one-upmanship, the apparent consumption that Thorstein Veblen wrote about in nineteeth century u.s.a..