The conclusive number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is a fact in question. As info from this nation, out in the very remote interior part of Central Asia, often is hard to get, this might not be too difficult to believe. Whether there are 2 or three legal casinos is the item at issue, perhaps not really the most earth-shaking piece of information that we do not have.
What certainly is true, as it is of the majority of the old Soviet nations, and certainly true of those in Asia, is that there certainly is many more not allowed and underground gambling halls. The adjustment to legalized wagering did not energize all the underground locations to come from the dark into the light. So, the bickering over the total number of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos is a tiny one at most: how many accredited ones is the element we’re attempting to resolve here.
We know that located in Bishkek, the capital municipality, there is the Casino Las Vegas (an amazingly original title, don’t you think?), which has both table games and slot machine games. We can also find both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. The pair of these offer 26 slot machine games and 11 gaming tables, separated amidst roulette, blackjack, and poker. Given the amazing similarity in the square footage and setup of these 2 Kyrgyzstan casinos, it might be even more astonishing to find that both share an location. This seems most strange, so we can no doubt conclude that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos, at least the legal ones, stops at 2 members, one of them having adjusted their title just a while ago.
The country, in common with the majority of the ex-Soviet Union, has undergone something of a accelerated adjustment to capitalistic system. The Wild East, you might say, to allude to the lawless circumstances of the Wild West a century and a half back.
Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens are in fact worth going to, therefore, as a piece of anthropological research, to see money being wagered as a type of social one-upmanship, the conspicuous consumption that Thorstein Veblen talked about in 19th century u.s..