The actual number of Kyrgyzstan gambling dens is a fact in question. As information from this nation, out in the very remote central part of Central Asia, can be hard to get, this might not be all that surprising. Regardless if there are 2 or 3 approved gambling halls is the thing at issue, maybe not really the most earth-shaking bit of data that we don’t have.
What no doubt will be credible, as it is of most of the old Soviet nations, and definitely truthful of those in Asia, is that there will be a lot more illegal and underground gambling halls. The adjustment to approved wagering didn’t energize all the former locations to come away from the dark into the light. So, the clash over the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens is a minor one at best: how many legal gambling halls is the element we’re trying to reconcile here.
We understand that in Bishkek, the capital metropolis, there is the Casino Las Vegas (an amazingly unique title, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and video slots. We will also see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Both of these have 26 slot machines and 11 gaming tables, separated amongst roulette, twenty-one, and poker. Given the amazing similarity in the square footage and floor plan of these two Kyrgyzstan casinos, it may be even more surprising to find that both are at the same location. This appears most bewildering, so we can perhaps state that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos, at least the accredited ones, stops at two members, one of them having changed their name a short time ago.
The country, in common with most of the ex-Soviet Union, has experienced something of a fast adjustment to free market. The Wild East, you might say, to refer to the lawless ways of the Wild West an aeon and a half ago.
Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are in fact worth visiting, therefore, as a bit of social research, to see money being wagered as a form of civil one-upmanship, the absolute consumption that Thorstein Veblen talked about in nineteeth century America.
