The complete number of Kyrgyzstan casinos is something in some dispute. As information from this nation, out in the very remote interior area of Central Asia, often is hard to acquire, this may not be too difficult to believe. Whether there are two or three legal casinos is the thing at issue, maybe not quite the most earth-shattering piece of data that we don’t have.

What certainly is credible, as it is of many of the old Soviet states, and certainly true of those in Asia, is that there certainly is many more illegal and clandestine gambling dens. The switch to legalized wagering did not energize all the former locations to come out of the dark and become legitimate. So, the controversy over the total number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens is a minor one at best: how many approved gambling dens is the element we’re seeking to reconcile here.

We are aware that located in Bishkek, the capital municipality, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a marvelously original title, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and one armed bandits. We will also see both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Both of these offer 26 slot machine games and 11 table games, divided between roulette, vingt-et-un, and poker. Given the amazing likeness in the square footage and layout of these two Kyrgyzstan casinos, it might be even more astonishing to determine that both are at the same location. This seems most confounding, so we can no doubt determine that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens, at least the accredited ones, stops at two casinos, 1 of them having altered their name just a while ago.

The nation, in common with nearly all of the ex-Soviet Union, has experienced something of a fast change to free market. The Wild East, you may say, to reference the lawless circumstances of the Wild West a century and a half ago.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are actually worth checking out, therefore, as a piece of social analysis, to see dollars being wagered as a type of social one-upmanship, the apparent consumption that Thorstein Veblen talked about in 19th century u.s..