[ English ]

The complete number of Kyrgyzstan casinos is a fact in some dispute. As info from this country, out in the very remote central part of Central Asia, often is awkward to receive, this might not be all that bizarre. Whether there are two or three approved gambling halls is the thing at issue, maybe not in fact the most consequential bit of info that we don’t have.

What will be credible, as it is of many of the old Russian states, and certainly true of those in Asia, is that there will be a good many more not legal and bootleg market casinos. The change to authorized wagering didn’t empower all the aforestated places to come out of the illegal into the legal. So, the contention regarding the total amount of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens is a minor one at best: how many accredited ones is the item we are trying to reconcile here.

We are aware that located in Bishkek, the capital city, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a stunningly original name, don’t you think?), which has both table games and slot machine games. We will additionally find both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. The two of these have 26 slot machines and 11 table games, separated between roulette, 21, and poker. Given the remarkable likeness in the size and floor plan of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling dens, it might be even more astonishing to see that the casinos are at the same location. This appears most unlikely, so we can likely conclude that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the accredited ones, is limited to 2 casinos, one of them having altered their title recently.

The country, in common with many of the ex-USSR, has experienced something of a rapid change to free market. The Wild East, you might say, to refer to the chaotic conditions of the Wild West a century and a half back.

Kyrgyzstan’s casinos are in fact worth going to, therefore, as a piece of anthropological research, to see money being bet as a form of civil one-upmanship, the apparent consumption that Thorstein Veblen spoke about in 19th century us of a.