The actual number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is something in some dispute. As data from this country, out in the very remote central area of Central Asia, can be hard to receive, this may not be too surprising. Whether there are two or three legal gambling dens is the thing at issue, perhaps not in fact the most consequential slice of information that we don’t have.

What no doubt will be correct, as it is of many of the ex-Soviet states, and certainly true of those in Asia, is that there certainly is many more not approved and bootleg market casinos. The switch to approved gambling did not drive all the former locations to come from the illegal into the legal. So, the contention over the total number of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos is a small one at best: how many legal gambling halls is the thing we are attempting to resolve here.

We know that located in Bishkek, the capital city, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a stunningly original title, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and video slots. We will also see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Each of these contain 26 slots and 11 gaming tables, separated amongst roulette, chemin de fer, and poker. Given the amazing likeness in the square footage and layout of these two Kyrgyzstan casinos, it may be even more astonishing to see that they are at the same address. This appears most strange, so we can perhaps conclude that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the legal ones, is limited to two casinos, 1 of them having adjusted their title recently.

The nation, in common with many of the ex-Soviet Union, has experienced something of a rapid change to free-enterprise economy. The Wild East, you might say, to reference the anarchical ways of the Wild West an aeon and a half ago.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens are in reality worth checking out, therefore, as a piece of anthropological analysis, to see chips being gambled as a type of social one-upmanship, the aristocratic consumption that Thorstein Veblen wrote about in nineteeth century us of a.