3 Apr 09

The conclusive number of Kyrgyzstan gambling dens is something in some dispute. As information from this nation, out in the very remote central area of Central Asia, can be awkward to get, this might not be too surprising. Regardless if there are two or three legal gambling dens is the item at issue, maybe not in reality the most all-important piece of information that we don’t have.

What no doubt will be correct, as it is of most of the old USSR states, and definitely truthful of those located in Asia, is that there certainly is a great many more illegal and bootleg market gambling dens. The switch to approved gambling did not encourage all the underground places to come out of the illegal into the legal. So, the battle regarding the total amount of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens is a small one at most: how many approved gambling halls is the thing we are attempting to resolve here.

We know that located in Bishkek, the capital city, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a remarkably unique name, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and video slots. We will also find both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Each of these contain 26 slots and 11 table games, split between roulette, 21, and poker. Given the amazing likeness in the square footage and floor plan of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling halls, it may be even more astonishing to see that both are at the same address. This seems most confounding, so we can clearly determine that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos, at least the accredited ones, is limited to 2 members, one of them having changed their name not long ago.

The nation, in common with almost all of the ex-USSR, has experienced something of a fast adjustment to free market. The Wild East, you might say, to allude tothe lawless circumstances of the Wild West a century and a half back.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens are in reality worth checking out, therefore, as a piece of anthropological analysis, to see money being bet as a type of social one-upmanship, the apparent consumption that Thorstein Veblen wrote about in 19th century America.