The confirmed number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is a fact in a little doubt. As information from this state, out in the very most interior area of Central Asia, often is difficult to receive, this may not be too surprising. Whether there are two or three approved casinos is the element at issue, maybe not quite the most earth-shattering piece of information that we don’t have.
What no doubt will be true, as it is of many of the ex-Soviet states, and certainly truthful of those in Asia, is that there no doubt will be a great many more not legal and clandestine casinos. The adjustment to approved wagering did not encourage all the former places to come away from the dark into the light. So, the battle over the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens is a tiny one at most: how many authorized gambling halls is the element we are attempting to resolve here.
We are aware that located in Bishkek, the capital city, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a spectacularly unique name, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and slot machines. We will also see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Each of these have 26 video slots and 11 gaming tables, separated amongst roulette, blackjack, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the size and floor plan of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling dens, it might be even more astonishing to see that they share an location. This appears most bewildering, so we can clearly state that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the accredited ones, stops at 2 members, 1 of them having adjusted their title not long ago.
The country, in common with many of the ex-Soviet Union, has experienced something of a fast adjustment to capitalism. The Wild East, you might say, to allude to the lawless ways of the Wild West a century and a half back.
Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are certainly worth visiting, therefore, as a piece of social research, to see money being gambled as a form of communal one-upmanship, the apparent consumption that Thorstein Veblen talked about in nineteeth century u.s..