The complete number of Kyrgyzstan casinos is something in some dispute. As details from this country, out in the very remote interior area of Central Asia, often is hard to achieve, this might not be too surprising. Regardless if there are two or three approved gambling halls is the element at issue, maybe not in reality the most earth-shaking article of info that we do not have.

What no doubt will be credible, as it is of the majority of the old Soviet states, and definitely true of those in Asia, is that there will be a great many more illegal and alternative gambling dens. The switch to approved wagering did not drive all the former gambling halls to come out of the illegal into the legal. So, the battle regarding the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls is a minor one at most: how many approved casinos is the element we’re attempting to resolve here.

We know that in Bishkek, the capital municipality, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a stunningly unique title, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and slot machine games. We can additionally see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Each of these contain 26 slots and 11 table games, split between roulette, vingt-et-un, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the sq.ft. and layout of these 2 Kyrgyzstan gambling dens, it might be even more surprising to see that both share an address. This appears most strange, so we can no doubt conclude that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos, at least the authorized ones, is limited to 2 casinos, one of them having altered their name a short while ago.

The state, in common with almost all of the ex-Soviet Union, has experienced something of a rapid conversion to free-enterprise system. The Wild East, you might say, to refer to the anarchical circumstances of the Wild West a century and a half back.

Kyrgyzstan’s casinos are in reality worth going to, therefore, as a bit of anthropological research, to see cash being played as a form of civil one-upmanship, the aristocratic consumption that Thorstein Veblen wrote about in nineteeth century usa.