Archive for April, 2021

Bingo in New Mexico

by Hudson on Friday, April 16th, 2021

[ English ]

New Mexico has a rocky gambling history. When the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act was signed by Congress in Nineteen Eighty Nine, it seemed like New Mexico would be one of the states to get on the American Indian casino craze. Politics assured that would not be the case.

The New Mexico governor Bruce King appointed a working group in 1990 to negotiate an accord with New Mexico Native tribes. When the task force arrived at an agreement with two prominent local bands a year later, Governor King declined to sign the agreement. He would hold up a deal until 1994.

When a new governor took office in Nineteen Ninety Five, it appeared that Amerindian betting in New Mexico was a certainty. But when the new Governor passed the accord with the Indian bands, anti-wagering forces were able to tie the deal up in courts. A New Mexico court found that the Governor had out stepped his bounds in signing a deal, thus denying the government of New Mexico hundreds of thousands of dollars in licensing revenues over the next several years.

It took the CNA, signed by the New Mexico legislature, to get the process moving on a full compact between the State of New Mexico and its Native tribes. Ten years had been squandered for gaming in New Mexico, including Indian casino Bingo.

The nonprofit Bingo industry has grown since Nineteen Ninety-Nine. In that year, New Mexico charity game providers acquired only $3,048 in revenues. This number grew to $725,150 in 2000, and exceeded a million dollars in revenues in 2001. Not for profit Bingo earnings have increased steadily since then. 2005 saw the largest year, with $1,233,289 earned by the operators.

Bingo is categorically beloved in New Mexico. All sorts of providers look for a slice of the pie. With hope, the politicos are through batting around gambling as a key factor like they did back in the 90’s. That is without doubt wishful thinking.

Kyrgyzstan gambling dens

by Hudson on Sunday, April 4th, 2021

The actual number of Kyrgyzstan gambling halls is a fact in some dispute. As data from this nation, out in the very remote interior part of Central Asia, tends to be awkward to achieve, this might not be all that bizarre. Regardless if there are two or three legal casinos is the thing at issue, perhaps not quite the most earth-shaking slice of information that we don’t have.

What will be accurate, as it is of the lion’s share of the ex-USSR nations, and definitely accurate of those located in Asia, is that there will be many more not allowed and backdoor gambling dens. The switch to legalized gambling didn’t energize all the former places to come out of the illegal into the legal. So, the debate regarding the total amount of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls is a minor one at most: how many approved gambling halls is the element we are trying to resolve here.

We know that located in Bishkek, the capital city, there is the Casino Las Vegas (an amazingly 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. Each of these contain 26 slots and 11 table games, divided between roulette, 21, and poker. Given the remarkable likeness in the sq.ft. and layout of these 2 Kyrgyzstan casinos, it might be even more surprising to find that they share an address. This appears most astonishing, so we can no doubt conclude that the number of Kyrgyzstan’s gambling halls, at least the legal ones, ends at two members, 1 of them having changed their title a short while ago.

The nation, in common with many of the ex-Soviet Union, has experienced something of a accelerated conversion to capitalism. The Wild East, you might say, to refer to the lawless ways of the Wild West a century and a half back.

Kyrgyzstan’s gambling dens are in reality worth visiting, therefore, as a bit of anthropological research, to see cash being played as a type of civil one-upmanship, the celebrated consumption that Thorstein Veblen talked about in 19th century America.