[ English ]

The confirmed number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is something in some dispute. As data from this state, out in the very most interior section of Central Asia, tends to be hard to acquire, this may not be too surprising. Whether there are two or 3 authorized gambling dens is the thing at issue, maybe not in reality the most consequential article of data that we don’t have.

What no doubt will be accurate, as it is of the lion’s share of the old USSR nations, and definitely accurate of those located in Asia, is that there no doubt will be a great many more illegal and alternative gambling dens. The adjustment to authorized wagering did not energize all the illegal gambling dens to come from the dark and become legitimate. So, the clash over the total number of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos is a small one at most: how many authorized casinos is the thing we’re trying to reconcile here.

We are aware that in Bishkek, the capital city, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a spectacularly original name, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and slots. We can also see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. The pair of these contain 26 video slots and 11 gaming tables, divided between roulette, twenty-one, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the sq.ft. and floor plan of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling halls, it may be even more astonishing to determine that they share an address. This seems most strange, so we can no doubt state that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the authorized ones, stops at two members, one of them having changed their title a short while ago.

The nation, in common with most of the ex-Soviet Union, has experienced something of a fast change to commercialism. The Wild East, you could say, to refer to the anarchical conditions of the Wild West a century and a half ago.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens are honestly worth going to, therefore, as a piece of social analysis, to see money being gambled as a form of social one-upmanship, the celebrated consumption that Thorstein Veblen spoke about in nineteeth century usa.