The confirmed number of Kyrgyzstan gambling dens is something in some dispute. As info from this country, out in the very remote interior area of Central Asia, can be arduous to get, this might not be too astonishing. Whether there are 2 or 3 legal gambling halls is the thing at issue, perhaps not in fact the most earth-shaking article of info that we don’t have.

What will be true, as it is of many of the ex-USSR states, and certainly correct of those in Asia, is that there no doubt will be a good many more not allowed and clandestine gambling halls. The change to approved gambling didn’t encourage all the underground places to come from the illegal into the legal. So, the debate over the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens is a minor one at best: how many approved ones is the element we are trying to answer here.

We know that in Bishkek, the capital city, there is the Casino Las Vegas (an amazingly unique name, don’t you think?), which has both table games and video slots. We will also find both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. The pair of these offer 26 one armed bandits and 11 table games, separated between roulette, 21, and poker. Given the amazing likeness in the size and layout of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling dens, it may be even more bizarre to find that both are at the same location. This appears most unlikely, so we can no doubt conclude that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens, at least the approved ones, is limited to two members, one of them having changed their title recently.

The nation, in common with the majority of the ex-Soviet Union, has undergone something of a rapid change to capitalistic system. The Wild East, you could say, to refer to the anarchical circumstances of the Wild West a century and a half back.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens are honestly worth going to, therefore, as a piece of social research, to see cash being gambled as a form of civil one-upmanship, the absolute consumption that Thorstein Veblen wrote about in nineteeth century u.s..