The actual number of Kyrgyzstan gambling dens is a fact in a little doubt. As data from this country, out in the very remote interior area of Central Asia, often is awkward to acquire, this might not be too bizarre. Whether there are 2 or three approved casinos is the element at issue, maybe not quite the most all-important bit of information that we do not have.
What no doubt will be true, as it is of the majority of the ex-Russian states, and certainly true of those in Asia, is that there will be a good many more not approved and alternative casinos. The adjustment to legalized gaming didn’t empower all the aforestated places to come away from the dark and become legitimate. So, the clash over the total number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls is a minor one at most: how many authorized gambling halls is the item we are attempting to resolve here.
We understand that in Bishkek, the capital city, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a spectacularly unique title, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and video slots. We can also find both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Each of these offer 26 slot machine games and 11 gaming tables, split amidst roulette, twenty-one, and poker. Given the amazing likeness in the sq.ft. and layout of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling halls, it may be even more bizarre to find that they are at the same address. This seems most astonishing, so we can clearly conclude that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens, at least the accredited ones, is limited to 2 casinos, 1 of them having altered their title a short time ago.
The state, in common with almost all of the ex-Soviet Union, has undergone something of a fast conversion to commercialism. The Wild East, you could say, to refer to the lawless ways of the Wild West an aeon and a half ago.
Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens are in reality worth going to, therefore, as a piece of anthropological analysis, to see cash being played as a type of collective one-upmanship, the apparent consumption that Thorstein Veblen wrote about in nineteeth century u.s..