The confirmed number of Kyrgyzstan gambling dens is a fact in some dispute. As info from this state, out in the very remote interior part of Central Asia, tends to be arduous to acquire, this might not be all that astonishing. Whether there are two or 3 legal gambling halls is the item at issue, maybe not in reality the most consequential slice of information that we don’t have.

What certainly is accurate, as it is of most of the ex-USSR states, and absolutely truthful of those located in Asia, is that there certainly is a great many more illegal and backdoor gambling halls. The switch to acceptable betting did not encourage all the illegal places to come out of the illegal into the legal. So, the controversy regarding the total amount of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens is a small one at most: how many approved gambling halls is the element we’re attempting to resolve here.

We understand that located in Bishkek, the capital city, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a remarkably original title, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and one armed bandits. We will also see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Both of these have 26 one armed bandits and 11 gaming tables, divided between roulette, twenty-one, and poker. Given the amazing likeness in the sq.ft. and floor plan of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling dens, it may be even more bizarre to find that the casinos are at the same address. This seems most bewildering, so we can perhaps determine that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the approved ones, ends at 2 members, one of them having changed their name not long ago.

The country, in common with practically all of the ex-USSR, has undergone something of a rapid conversion to free-enterprise economy. The Wild East, you could say, to allude to the anarchical circumstances of the Wild West an aeon and a half ago.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are actually worth going to, therefore, as a piece of anthropological research, to see money being bet as a form of communal one-upmanship, the conspicuous consumption that Thorstein Veblen talked about in 19th century u.s.a..