Nevada and Delaware Interstate Poker Agreement not Enough

Nevada and Delaware signed on online poker compact last week.  This compact (read: agreement) means that residents of these states can play online poker against each other.  So, online poker operators in both of these states can accept players from either state.  The USA Today story on this agreement can be found here. 

This is a good thing, but it really isn't sufficient to make Nevada or Delaware online poker a big money maker.  Why?  Because the populations of these states are just too small.  Nevada has approximately 2.75 million people and Delaware has approximately 917,000 people.  This is barely 1% of the 316 million people in the USA.  For Nevada and Delaware to really get critical mass, they need to have deals with more states.  I don't see that happening.  If I was a governor of a larger state, I wouldn't necessarily compact with Delaware or Nevada because I won't get as much value from them as they get from me.

If you take the population of Nevada (rank 35 of 50) and add the populations of every state that is smaller, which includes Delaware (rank 45 of 50), you barely break 20 million.  Now 20 million isn't necessarily bad, but you have to have those 15 states working together and agreeing on the deal to get to an aggregate 20 million population.  To put that into perspective, that number is just slightly larger than the population of Florida (rank 4 of 50), which has a population of approximately 19.5 million.

Nevada and Delaware have to somehow get agreements with larger states to feed off of their larger populations before the larger states get wise.  I don't think that will happen.  I foresee something different. I predict that the four largest states will eventually work together and craft a compact just among themselves.  Those states are California (38.3 million), Texas (26.5 million), New York (19.6 million) and Florida (19.5 million).  Add that up and you have approximately 104 million, almost one-third of the entire US population.  THAT is a good number and you only need four states to work together.

Illinois and Pennsylvania are both a bit above 12 million in population, but that is a big drop from over 19 million.  If I were those four states, I would just work together and perhaps add Illinois and Pennsylvania, which would put the total size of the "Big 6" network at just under 130 million.  This is a large enough number that would be sufficient to have a good population of online poker players.  Then, that group could then cut deals with other countries.

With online poker, size DOES matter.  California, Texas, New York and Florida have it - Nevada and Delaware don't.