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The confirmed number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is something in some dispute. As information from this nation, out in the very remote interior section of Central Asia, can be awkward to get, this might not be all that astonishing. Whether there are 2 or three legal gambling dens is the element at issue, perhaps not quite the most earth-shattering piece of info that we don’t have.

What no doubt will be credible, as it is of the majority of the old Soviet states, and certainly truthful of those in Asia, is that there certainly is a good many more illegal and bootleg market gambling dens. The switch to legalized gambling did not energize all the former locations to come out of the dark into the light. So, the controversy regarding the total amount of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos is a minor one at most: how many legal ones is the item we are trying to answer here.

We are aware that in Bishkek, the capital municipality, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a spectacularly original name, don’t you think?), which has both table games and one armed bandits. We can additionally see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Both of these offer 26 slot machine games and 11 table games, split amongst roulette, 21, and poker. Given the remarkable likeness in the square footage and setup of these 2 Kyrgyzstan casinos, it might be even more astonishing to determine that they share an address. This appears most confounding, so we can no doubt determine that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens, at least the legal ones, ends at 2 members, one of them having altered their name not long ago.

The country, in common with many of the ex-Soviet Union, has undergone something of a accelerated adjustment to capitalism. The Wild East, you might say, to refer to the chaotic ways of the Wild West a century and a half ago.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens are actually worth visiting, therefore, as a piece of anthropological research, to see cash being wagered as a form of civil one-upmanship, the celebrated consumption that Thorstein Veblen wrote about in 19th century America.