The confirmed number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is something in a little doubt. As data from this country, out in the very most interior area of Central Asia, tends to be awkward to get, this might not be all that astonishing. Whether there are two or 3 accredited gambling halls is the element at issue, maybe not in reality the most consequential bit of data that we do not have.

What will be accurate, as it is of many of the ex-USSR states, and absolutely accurate of those in Asia, is that there no doubt will be a great many more not legal and clandestine gambling halls. The switch to approved betting did not encourage all the illegal gambling dens to come out of the illegal into the legal. So, the battle over the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls is a minor one at best: how many accredited ones is the thing we are attempting to reconcile here.

We know that located in Bishkek, the capital municipality, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a remarkably original title, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and slots. We will additionally find both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. The pair of these contain 26 slots and 11 gaming tables, divided amidst roulette, blackjack, and poker. Given the remarkable similarity in the size and layout of these two Kyrgyzstan gambling halls, it might be even more bizarre to find that they share an address. This seems most strange, so we can likely state that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos, at least the approved ones, is limited to 2 members, 1 of them having changed their name just a while ago.

The nation, in common with practically all of the ex-USSR, has undergone something of a fast conversion to capitalistic system. The Wild East, you may say, to allude to the lawless ways of the Wild West a century and a half ago.

Kyrgyzstan’s casinos are in fact worth going to, therefore, as a piece of anthropological analysis, to see money being gambled as a form of communal one-upmanship, the aristocratic consumption that Thorstein Veblen wrote about in nineteeth century America.