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The confirmed number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is something in some dispute. As info from this country, out in the very remote interior part of Central Asia, tends to be hard to achieve, this may not be all that surprising. Regardless if there are 2 or three approved gambling halls is the thing at issue, maybe not quite the most all-important bit of info that we don’t have.
What no doubt will be true, as it is of the majority of the old Soviet nations, and certainly true of those located in Asia, is that there will be a lot more not legal and backdoor casinos. The switch to authorized gambling did not encourage all the former locations to come out of the dark and become legitimate. So, the bickering over the total amount of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos is a tiny one at best: how many authorized gambling dens is the thing we are attempting to reconcile here.
We understand that in Bishkek, the capital municipality, there is the Casino Las Vegas (an amazingly unique title, don’t you think?), which has both table games and video slots. We will additionally see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. The two of these have 26 one armed bandits and 11 gaming tables, separated between roulette, 21, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the size and setup of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling halls, it may be even more astonishing to find that they share an location. This seems most difficult to believe, so we can perhaps state that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens, at least the legal ones, ends at two casinos, one of them having adjusted their title not long ago.
The nation, in common with practically all of the ex-USSR, has undergone something of a accelerated adjustment to capitalistic system. The Wild East, you may say, to refer to the anarchical circumstances of the Wild West an aeon and a half ago.
Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens are certainly worth checking out, therefore, as a piece of anthropological research, to see money being gambled as a type of communal one-upmanship, the conspicuous consumption that Thorstein Veblen spoke about in nineteeth century u.s..