[ English ]

The confirmed number of Kyrgyzstan casinos is a fact in question. As details from this country, out in the very most interior area of Central Asia, often is awkward to achieve, this might not be too difficult to believe. Regardless if there are 2 or 3 legal casinos is the thing at issue, perhaps not quite the most all-important piece of info that we do not have.

What will be true, as it is of most of the old Soviet nations, and absolutely accurate of those located in Asia, is that there no doubt will be a good many more illegal and underground gambling halls. The switch to authorized betting did not empower all the underground places to come out of the illegal into the legal. So, the controversy over the total number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls is a small one at most: how many approved ones is the thing we are attempting to answer here.

We are aware that located in Bishkek, the capital city, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a remarkably unique name, don’t you think?), which has both table games and slot machine games. We will also see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. The pair of these have 26 one armed bandits and 11 table games, split amongst roulette, chemin de fer, and poker. Given the remarkable likeness in the size and setup of these 2 Kyrgyzstan gambling dens, it might be even more astonishing to determine that both are at the same location. This seems most astonishing, so we can perhaps conclude that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the accredited ones, is limited to 2 casinos, one of them having altered their name not long ago.

The nation, in common with most of the ex-USSR, has experienced something of a fast adjustment to free-enterprise system. The Wild East, you could say, to reference the lawless circumstances of the Wild West a century and a half ago.

Kyrgyzstan’s casinos are certainly worth checking out, therefore, as a piece of anthropological analysis, to see money being played as a type of civil one-upmanship, the celebrated consumption that Thorstein Veblen wrote about in 19th century usa.