The conclusive number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is something in a little doubt. As details from this state, out in the very remote central part of Central Asia, tends to be difficult to achieve, this may not be all that surprising. Whether there are two or three authorized gambling halls is the thing at issue, maybe not really the most earth-shattering bit of information that we do not have.

What will be accurate, as it is of most of the old USSR nations, and definitely correct of those located in Asia, is that there no doubt will be many more not legal and alternative casinos. The adjustment to acceptable betting did not encourage all the underground places to come away from the illegal into the legal. So, the debate over the number of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos is a minor one at most: how many accredited ones is the item we are trying to resolve here.

We understand that located in Bishkek, the capital metropolis, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a remarkably original title, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and slot machines. We can also find both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Both of these offer 26 slots and 11 table games, split between roulette, twenty-one, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the sq.ft. and setup of these two Kyrgyzstan casinos, it might be even more bizarre to determine that they are at the same location. This seems most confounding, so we can perhaps state that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the authorized ones, ends at two members, one of them having adjusted their name a short while ago.

The nation, in common with most of the ex-Soviet Union, has undergone something of a fast change to capitalistic system. The Wild East, you could say, to refer to the anarchical circumstances of the Wild West a century and a half back.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens are actually worth going to, therefore, as a piece of anthropological analysis, to see money being wagered as a form of social one-upmanship, the celebrated consumption that Thorstein Veblen spoke about in nineteeth century u.s.a..