The complete number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is something in some dispute. As information from this state, out in the very remote central area of Central Asia, can be hard to achieve, this may not be too surprising. Regardless if there are two or three approved casinos is the thing at issue, maybe not in fact the most earth-shaking bit of info that we don’t have.

What certainly is true, as it is of the majority of the ex-Russian states, and absolutely true of those located in Asia, is that there no doubt will be many more not legal and clandestine casinos. The change to acceptable betting did not drive all the underground places to come out of the illegal into the legal. So, the controversy over the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls is a tiny one at most: how many legal ones is the element we are attempting to resolve here.

We know that in Bishkek, the capital metropolis, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a marvelously original title, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and slot machines. We can additionally see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. The two of these contain 26 slot machines and 11 table games, split amongst roulette, vingt-et-un, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the size and layout of these 2 Kyrgyzstan casinos, it may be even more surprising to see that both are at the same address. This appears most astonishing, so we can likely state that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the accredited ones, stops at two members, 1 of them having changed their name a short while ago.

The country, in common with most of the ex-USSR, has undergone something of a accelerated change to free-enterprise economy. The Wild East, you could say, to reference the anarchical circumstances of the Wild West an aeon and a half back.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are almost certainly worth going to, therefore, as a bit of anthropological analysis, to see chips being wagered as a form of social one-upmanship, the aristocratic consumption that Thorstein Veblen wrote about in 19th century us of a.