The confirmed number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is a fact in question. As information from this country, out in the very remote interior section of Central Asia, tends to be hard to acquire, this may not be too astonishing. Whether there are 2 or 3 accredited gambling dens is the thing at issue, perhaps not in fact the most earth-shaking piece of data that we do not have.
What will be accurate, as it is of most of the old Soviet states, and definitely accurate of those located in Asia, is that there will be a great many more illegal and bootleg market gambling halls. The change to approved gambling did not encourage all the former places to come out of the dark into the light. So, the controversy over the total number of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos is a small one at best: how many authorized gambling halls is the element we are trying to resolve here.
We know that in Bishkek, the capital city, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a remarkably original title, don’t you think?), which has both table games and one armed bandits. We can also find both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. The pair of these contain 26 slot machines and 11 table games, split between roulette, twenty-one, and poker. Given the amazing likeness in the square footage and layout of these 2 Kyrgyzstan gambling halls, it may be even more bizarre to see that the casinos share an location. This seems most strange, so we can no doubt state that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos, at least the accredited ones, stops at 2 casinos, one of them having altered their title recently.
The country, in common with the majority of the ex-Soviet Union, has undergone something of a accelerated conversion to free-enterprise system. The Wild East, you might say, to refer to the anarchical circumstances of the Wild West an aeon and a half ago.
Kyrgyzstan’s casinos are in fact worth visiting, therefore, as a piece of social research, to see dollars being gambled as a type of social one-upmanship, the celebrated consumption that Thorstein Veblen talked about in 19th century America.