[ English ]

The actual number of Kyrgyzstan gambling dens is something in some dispute. As information from this country, out in the very remote interior section of Central Asia, tends to be difficult to get, this might not be too difficult to believe. Whether there are 2 or three authorized casinos is the element at issue, maybe not in reality the most consequential piece of info that we do not have.

What no doubt will be credible, as it is of most of the old Soviet states, and certainly accurate of those in Asia, is that there certainly is a great many more not allowed and bootleg market casinos. The adjustment to approved gambling did not encourage all the aforestated places to come from the dark into the light. So, the bickering over the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls is a small one at most: how many legal casinos is the thing we’re trying to resolve here.

We know that in Bishkek, the capital metropolis, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a remarkably original title, don’t you think?), which has both table games and slot machine games. We can additionally see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Both of these have 26 slot machine games and 11 gaming tables, divided amidst roulette, twenty-one, and poker. Given the amazing similarity in the size and layout of these 2 Kyrgyzstan gambling halls, it might be even more bizarre to determine that the casinos share an address. This seems most unlikely, so we can perhaps state that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the legal ones, ends at 2 members, 1 of them having adjusted their title not long ago.

The state, in common with practically all of the ex-USSR, has experienced something of a accelerated conversion to free market. The Wild East, you might say, to refer to the lawless ways of the Wild West an aeon and a half back.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are actually worth visiting, therefore, as a piece of social research, to see dollars being wagered as a form of collective one-upmanship, the apparent consumption that Thorstein Veblen wrote about in nineteeth century America.