In a recent Scouting Report, PokerScout.com compared the cash game traffic of the US states with legal online poker rooms with traffic data from before Black Friday. PokerScout didn’t know the exact pre-Black Friday state-by-state player breakdown, as this is not something that was tracked, but it used traffic data and player demographics from early 2010 to get an estimate.

PokerScout found that levels of player activity in New Jersey and Nevada are about the same now as they were before Black Friday. New Jersey is under-performing slightly, while Nevada’s current traffic is actually beating its pre-Black Friday numbers. PokerScout attributes Nevada’s success to the high concentration of professional poker players in the state as well as its head start as the first US jurisdiction to legalize online poker, which happened almost a year ago.

Delaware also has a regulated online gambling market. Looking at PokerScout’s data, Delaware’s three online poker rooms have only drawn an average of 14 cash game players per day over the past week combined. More people were logging on to poker sites in Delaware before Black Friday than they are now. Delaware did sign an interstate poker compact with Nevada recently, though, so hopefully it will see a boost in traffic once the two states’ player pools are combined.

PokerScout has drawn two conclusions from its findings. The first is that as long as a state has a large enough population to support online poker, it is possible to predict post-regulation traffic using pre-Black Friday numbers. Second, although limits are set on the potential online poker markets by restricting the player bases to the confines of each state’s borders, this is counter-balanced by the fact that the games are legal. As PokerScout puts it, “legality makes up for liquidity.”

The theory is that even though players had a wider array of sites from which to choose before Black Friday and many of those sites were bigger than the ones that now exist, a smaller percentage of people chose to play because of the questionable legality of the sites. Today, players in Nevada, New Jersey, and Delaware don’t have a wide array of options, but they are more apt to give it a go because they likely feel the sites are safer and it is easier to get funds on and off.

Looking ahead to other states that have a non-zero chance of legalizing online poker, PokerScout sees the potential poker market in Massachusetts as being slightly larger than that of New Jersey, while Illinois would boast almost twice the number of players as the Garden State. Then there is California. That state would be a behemoth. The most populous state in the US, PokerScout estimates that California could handle 14 poker sites the size of the major ones in New Jersey.

Visit PocketFives’ Nevada pokercommunity and New Jersey poker community for the latest news and discussion from local players.

PokerScout’s Scouting Report is a daily newsletter for the online poker industry, with in-depth data and analysis of the market. More information can be found by clicking here or contacting [email protected].

Want the latest poker headlines and interviews? Follow PocketFives on Twitterand Like PocketFives on Facebook. You can also subscribe to our RSS feed.