The conclusive number of Kyrgyzstan gambling dens is a fact in a little doubt. As data from this state, out in the very remote interior area of Central Asia, tends to be awkward to get, this may not be too bizarre. Whether there are two or three legal gambling halls is the thing at issue, maybe not really the most consequential slice of info that we don’t have.

What will be accurate, as it is of most of the ex-USSR states, and definitely truthful of those located in Asia, is that there no doubt will be a good many more not legal and bootleg market casinos. The change to approved gaming didn’t drive all the underground gambling halls to come from the illegal into the legal. So, the battle regarding the number of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos is a small one at most: how many legal ones is the thing we are trying to resolve here.

We know that in Bishkek, the capital municipality, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a spectacularly original title, don’t you think?), which has both table games and slot machines. We can also see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Each of these contain 26 video slots and 11 gaming tables, separated amidst roulette, twenty-one, and poker. Given the remarkable likeness in the sq.ft. and floor plan of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling dens, it might be even more astonishing to find that they share an location. This appears most unlikely, so we can perhaps conclude that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos, at least the approved ones, is limited to two casinos, 1 of them having altered their title a short time ago.

The nation, in common with almost all of the ex-USSR, has undergone something of a accelerated conversion to capitalistic system. The Wild East, you may say, to reference the anarchical circumstances of the Wild West an aeon and a half ago.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens are in fact worth checking out, therefore, as a bit of anthropological analysis, to see chips being wagered as a form of collective one-upmanship, the aristocratic consumption that Thorstein Veblen talked about in 19th century America.