[
English ]
The actual number of Kyrgyzstan gambling dens is something in question. As details from this country, out in the very remote interior area of Central Asia, tends to be hard to achieve, this may not be too surprising. Regardless if there are 2 or three accredited casinos is the element at issue, maybe not in fact the most all-important bit of info that we don’t have.
What no doubt will be correct, as it is of many of the ex-USSR nations, and definitely correct of those located in Asia, is that there certainly is a lot more not legal and clandestine casinos. The switch to acceptable betting did not encourage all the aforestated locations to come from the dark and become legitimate. So, the controversy over the total number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls is a tiny one at most: how many legal ones is the item we’re attempting to answer here.
We know that located in Bishkek, the capital municipality, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a marvelously unique name, don’t you think?), which has both table games and slot machine games. We can also see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. The pair of these contain 26 slot machines and 11 gaming tables, split amongst roulette, twenty-one, and poker. Given the amazing similarity in the square footage and layout of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling halls, it may be even more bizarre to see that they are at the same location. This seems most confounding, so we can no doubt conclude that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the approved ones, ends at 2 members, 1 of them having changed their title not long ago.
The country, in common with many of the ex-Soviet Union, has experienced something of a fast change to capitalistic system. The Wild East, you may say, to refer to the lawless circumstances of the Wild West a century and a half back.
Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are in fact worth visiting, therefore, as a piece of anthropological research, to see chips being bet as a form of collective one-upmanship, the apparent consumption that Thorstein Veblen spoke about in 19th century u.s..