[ English ]

The complete number of Kyrgyzstan casinos is something in some dispute. As information from this country, out in the very most interior part of Central Asia, can be difficult to achieve, this may not be all that difficult to believe. Whether there are 2 or three authorized gambling dens is the item at issue, maybe not in reality the most all-important piece of data that we don’t have.

What will be true, as it is of the majority of the ex-Russian states, and absolutely true of those in Asia, is that there certainly is a great many more not allowed and clandestine casinos. The adjustment to authorized wagering didn’t energize all the former locations to come away from the dark and become legitimate. So, the clash regarding the number of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos is a tiny one at most: how many legal ones is the item we are attempting to answer here.

We understand that 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 machines. We will also see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Each of these offer 26 video slots and 11 gaming tables, divided amongst roulette, chemin de fer, and poker. Given the amazing likeness in the square footage and floor plan of these 2 Kyrgyzstan gambling dens, it might be even more bizarre to see that both are at the same address. This appears most astonishing, so we can clearly conclude that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos, at least the approved ones, stops at 2 casinos, 1 of them having changed their name not long ago.

The nation, in common with almost all of the ex-USSR, has experienced something of a rapid conversion to free-enterprise system. The Wild East, you might say, to refer to the lawless conditions of the Wild West an aeon and a half back.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are actually worth going to, therefore, as a bit of anthropological research, to see money being played as a type of communal one-upmanship, the celebrated consumption that Thorstein Veblen talked about in 19th century u.s.a..