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The confirmed number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is something in some dispute. As details from this country, out in the very remote interior area of Central Asia, tends to be arduous to acquire, this might not be too astonishing. Whether there are two or three legal casinos is the element at issue, maybe not in fact the most earth-shaking piece of info that we don’t have.
What no doubt will be accurate, as it is of the lion’s share of the old USSR nations, and definitely true of those in Asia, is that there certainly is a great many more not approved and clandestine casinos. The switch to legalized betting did not empower all the illegal places to come from the illegal into the legal. So, the battle over the total number of Kyrgyzstan’s casinos is a tiny one at best: how many authorized casinos is the element we are seeking to reconcile here.
We understand that in Bishkek, the capital metropolis, there is the Casino Las Vegas (a spectacularly original name, don’t you think?), which has both gaming tables and slot machines. We will also find both the Casino Bishkek and the Xanadu Casino. Each of these have 26 slot machines and 11 gaming tables, split between roulette, chemin de fer, and poker. Given the remarkable likeness in the square footage and setup of these 2 Kyrgyzstan casinos, it may be even more astonishing to determine that both are at the same location. This seems most strange, so we can no doubt conclude that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the authorized ones, is limited to 2 members, 1 of them having altered their name not long ago.
The state, in common with nearly all of the ex-Soviet Union, has undergone something of a fast conversion to free-enterprise system. The Wild East, you could say, to allude to the chaotic circumstances of the Wild West a century and a half back.
Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls are in fact worth checking out, therefore, as a bit of social analysis, to see money being bet as a form of social one-upmanship, the apparent consumption that Thorstein Veblen talked about in 19th century us of a.
