Online poker tells are not like live ones. The only things you have to go on are betting patterns and time intervals between actions. If you notice that a player always acts fast, and suddenly they are pausing on the river before betting, they’re usually trying to induce a call and have a good hand.

Another common one is when the player decides to start using the auto-play buttons. You make a bet and they have the raise button already pressed, to make it look like they have the nuts and will raise anything. If the player hasn’t been using these buttons prior to this, they are most likely bluffing.

The old “I have to leave” after the all-in move is a classic. A guy gets pocket aces and goes all-in after he writes in the chat that he has to leave the tournament, like he’s giving away his chips.

The days of having to sign your life away to join an online casino are long gone. Playing slots online couldn’t be any easier than it is now. It used to be a pain to fill out the profile questionnaire and then wait for a download that would take five minutes to complete. Even once it finished, the games were boring and there wasn’t much of a selection to choose from.

Now there are games you can play that don’t even require a download, you just click and play. There are still player profile questionnaires, but you only fill them out when you play real-money games, and they’re much shorter than they used to be.

There’s also many more banking options these days; we’re no longer limited to just one or two options. Most casinos have at least a half-dozen different ways to buy-in and cash out.

The best tip you could have received for NBA betting before the season began was to bet it all on the Celtics right from the start. But since the time machine hasn’t been perfected yet, you’ll have to do your homework to make some profit on your NBA bets the rest of the way. You can still keep dumping money on the Celtics, but Boston has since failed to cover the spread for the first time this season and fell to Orlando Sunday.

One factor you can take advantage of in NBA betting that doesn’t exist in the NFL is lengthy opposite-coast road trips. In the NFL teams play one week and get at least six days off before playing again. In the NBA fatigue can become a big factor when an east-coast team heads west, or a west-coast team heads east. Most coast-to-coast trips aren’t for just one game, and during a two- or three-game road trip across the country, the second or third game can be real tough on the visiting team. Give the schedule a closer look, find the teams making the cross-country journey, and try betting against them. It will often pay off.

Unless you’re a born and bred Canadian, chances are you haven’t even put on a pair of skates in your life. But that doesn’t mean you’re unqualified to bet on hockey.

It’s a really simple sport: put the puck in the net. Some teams are better at it than others. Also, some teams are much better at keeping the puck out of the net. If you do the math on the two goaltenders in a matchup, you’re already ahead of the game.

The betting side of things isn’t rocket science, either. It’s a lot like baseball betting; there’s the moneyline, and there’s the spread, which looks and cooks the same as the MLB runline. If you’re not a big fan of either, try the totals. These are very popular, since you don’t have to do too much math on the chalk; it’s usually hovering around the familiar –110. And you get to keep your teeth.

With the United Kingdom taking the lead with online poker regulation, many companies are cashing in on the gaming boom. Poker and gaming in Europe are growth businesses the way they were in the U.S. up until last October. Some big companies have taken notice of the profits that the industry is producing, and now that doing business within the industry is more secure, poker and betting is popping up in some new places.

AOL UK has just announced that they will allow sports betting to their customers. The numbers will be run through a German online lottery and sports betting company. They will offer it to U.K. patrons first, at the end of this month, and then they hope to spread it to other European countries soon afterward. AOL has been running a lottery through the German company since 2003, but the sports betting industry in Europe is a huge market. This is a result of Yahoo UK & Ireland entering the online poker market a few months ago. Yahoo was the first online giant to provide poker to its vast database of customers.

These companies have an advantage over other startup gaming companies because they already have access to the online market. They have access to a large number of poker players that they can reach directly. Depending on how aggressive these big companies get with their marketing, there could be a real shift in the industry if they can entice enough players away from the existing casinos and poker rooms.

Other big-name companies are rumored to have an interest in the industry. Giants like Sony, Apple, Time Warner and Universal are all paying close attention to the U.K. gaming market and a possible regulated online industry in the States. The huge Asian market that online gaming is about to tap into is one of the reasons that these big companies are looking to get involved in the industry now. Let’s hope the competition leads to better advantages for the players in the future.