The actual number of Kyrgyzstan casinos is a fact in question. As info from this country, out in the very remote interior part of Central Asia, can be hard to achieve, this may not be too astonishing. Whether there are 2 or 3 legal gambling dens is the element at issue, perhaps not in fact the most earth-shattering bit of information that we don’t have.
What no doubt will be accurate, as it is of many of the ex-USSR states, and certainly truthful of those in Asia, is that there no doubt will be a great many more illegal and bootleg market gambling dens. The adjustment to legalized gaming did not empower all the aforestated gambling halls to come out of the illegal into the legal. So, the contention over the total number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls is a minor one at most: how many approved casinos is the item we are attempting to resolve here.
We know that in Bishkek, the capital city, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a remarkably original name, don’t you think?), which has both table games and slot machines. We can also find both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. The two of these offer 26 slot machine games and 11 table games, separated between roulette, 21, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the square footage and floor plan of these 2 Kyrgyzstan gambling dens, it may be even more astonishing to determine that the casinos are at the same location. This appears most unlikely, so we can perhaps state that the list of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos, at least the authorized ones, ends at 2 casinos, 1 of them having altered their name recently.
The nation, in common with almost all of the ex-USSR, has undergone something of a fast conversion to free market. The Wild East, you may say, to refer to the chaotic conditions of the Wild West a century and a half back.
Kyrgyzstan’s casinos are actually worth checking out, therefore, as a bit of anthropological research, to see dollars being wagered as a form of civil one-upmanship, the conspicuous consumption that Thorstein Veblen wrote about in 19th century u.s.a..