The complete number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is something in a little doubt. As information from this state, out in the very most central area of Central Asia, can be awkward to acquire, this may not be all that astonishing. Whether there are 2 or 3 legal gambling halls is the item at issue, perhaps not quite the most consequential bit of information that we don’t have.

What will be accurate, as it is of most of the ex-USSR states, and certainly accurate of those located in Asia, is that there no doubt will be a good many more not legal and clandestine gambling halls. The adjustment to acceptable gambling didn’t empower all the underground gambling dens to come out of the dark into the light. So, the debate over the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens is a tiny one at most: how many authorized casinos is the thing we are trying to reconcile here.

We understand that located in Bishkek, the capital city, 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. Both of these have 26 slot machine games and 11 table games, split amidst roulette, twenty-one, and poker. Given the remarkable likeness in the sq.ft. and layout of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling dens, it may be even more surprising to find that the casinos are at the same location. This appears most confounding, so we can clearly state that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos, at least the authorized ones, is limited to 2 members, 1 of them having changed their name recently.

The country, in common with practically all of the ex-Soviet Union, has experienced something of a accelerated adjustment to free-enterprise economy. The Wild East, you may say, to refer to the chaotic conditions of the Wild West an aeon and a half back.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are certainly worth going to, therefore, as a piece of social analysis, to see dollars being bet as a form of civil one-upmanship, the absolute consumption that Thorstein Veblen spoke about in nineteeth century America.