Working on Your CORE

We’ve already broken down the recently updated Core 2.0 A-Z poker course and to get to the heart of the matter, we spoke to James “Splitsuit” Sweeney, the man behind its creation. The CORE course on Red Chip Poker has an incredible 200 poker training lessons, each of which is tailored to players’ needs.

“The original goal with CORE was to deliver on a request we’d gotten for years: a clear syllabus for learning poker,” says James. The team spent weeks crafting a syllabus and meticulously creating a linear structure for teaching poker knowledge. We essentially threw every concept we could think of at a board, ranked them by difficulty and importance, and got to work building out each lesson.”

The result is that players who benefit the most from CORE are new to intermediate players, because the material is designed to both build and backfill poker strategy.

“Advanced players will get the most from PRO – which does include full access to CORE – but if a player is newer to the game or looking to fix leaks, we highly suggest CORE.”

PRO is definitely the product of choice if you are serious about upgrading your poker game, and to that point you can read our Top 10 Reasons Why Red Chip Poker PRO Membership is worth it.

Helping Poker Players Interact with Learning

The CORE Course is highly interactive and encourages players to put the lessons they learn into immediate practice. Making the course hands-on was an inspiration throughout the design process.

“This was something we were adamant on adding to CORE from the beginning,” James tells us. “One of the most complex aspects of poker is that playing one or two sessions doesn’t offer a great feedback mechanism for specific spots/knowledge. Quizzes acted as a great way to offer players a chance to prove their knowledge of a concept without risking money.”

Red Chip Poker can call on some big hitters to back up their training, with Ed Miller and WSOP bracelet winner Chris ‘Fox’ Wallace both guiding players through lessons in both cash and MTTs. Does James think players will end up choosing one or the other or does the course help players balance both?

“Given that CORE is meant more for new to intermediate players, we tend to suggest they focus on one: either cash games or tournaments. Both formats are quite different, and trying to learn both at the same time isn’t a great idea. That said, quite a few skills and concepts will transfer between the two formats flawlessly, especially the underlying math.”

Overall, it’s best to pick one format and really dive deep on that, instead of bouncing back and forth between the two, James explains, having himself always adored cash games.

“I prefer the additional stack depth that cash games offer as I think the dynamics are far more interesting,” he says. “I also love the flexibility that cash games offer. With a tournament, you might play 20 minutes before busting, or multiple days if you run deep. My schedule between work and family just doesn’t allow for that, so cash games just check all of my boxes.”

Visualizing Improvement

The Red Chip Poker CORE training package isn’t just great value with so much included for the price, but the user interface is really clean. With 95% of poker players being male. We wondered whether Red Chip Poker catered for the adage that men prefer visual stimuli when putting CORE together.

“That’s interesting, as I’ve never thought about the visual component from a male vs. female point of view,” James admits. I just think clear and clean graphics are important for helping someone be able to follow content more easily. We spent a lot of time working on the art style and UI/UX and we are still making tweaks to flatten as many barriers to access for students.”

Hand analysis is easy to do once anyone actually starts, but many players leave this until last. The CORE course specifically helps those who struggle to dive into this area of self-improvement.

“Most players struggle with hand analysis for a variety of reasons. Just a few of them are:

• They don’t have the prerequisite knowledge to analyze a specific spot yet.
• They didn’t write their original hand down very well. (GIGO)
• They don’t have a community to bounce with and get lost in their own head.

With CORE, we put the HH deep dives later in the structure to ensure the student had enough prerequisite knowledge to analyze a hand well. And the HH lessons also have links to related concepts for additional study or review.”

CORE also caters to anyone who wants to improve how they write down the poker lessons they learn, how they save them for later analysis, and this is especially important for any player not having tracking software to do this work for them. They also have a very busy group where students can interact with each other.

“Our Discord is quite active with over 4,000 members and players analyzing hands regularly. So even if you get stuck while reviewing a hand, or just want a wider range of opinions on a spot, the Discord group is the perfect place to do that.”

Looking to the Future of Poker

Adapting to each new poker era, such as GTO play, is vital to any poker training business. Push/fold and range charts are nothing new, but with the recent changes to poker, has this meant a full overview change or just weeks to this side of the CORE content of the course?

“Over the last few years, we’ve spent a lot of effort making updates to CORE, especially as it relates to both ranges and also GTO content.” Describes James. “For instance, we added a totally new level to the beginning of CORE to help players develop solid preflop ranges. And we’ve also created our GTO Ranges App as a by-product of this work.”

READ MORE: Red Chip Poker GTO Ranges App Review

Red Chip Poker are currently conducting their own annual review, which will allow them to revamp, update, and upgrade content focused on GTO findings. CORE was built from the beginning in such a way that they could continuously update the material to ensure it doesn’t become outdated. It’s a plan that is helping so many players improve, which James tells us is still the biggest plus of all.

“I’m most proud of the team for launching CORE as it was a huge undertaking, in both time and money. But I’m also quite proud of the students that we consistently hear from that have directly leveraged things they learned in CORE into actual success at the tables. Hearing that players who have struggled for so long have quickly turned the corner and are now more confident in their good decision making – that always puts a smile on my face!”

You can purchase CORE now, or if you’ve completed the CORE Course via Red Chip Poker, then maybe it’s time to go PRO.

Poker training sites have been around for many years now. Most have followed a very similar model: produce videos and series on various poker topics and let the subscriber take what they can from the information provided. This is, one could argue, a perfectly natural approach. But, despite its uniformity there’s little in the way of hard evidence that it produces highly-skilled poker players, and thus no absolute reason to infer that it is the most efficient approach for achieving that goal.

Red Chip Poker’s CORE program is a radical departure from the conventional poker training approach, and their CORE 2.0 update just takes the program to the next level.

It was motivated, at least in part, by the combined experiences of Red Chip Poker coaches through their work with hundreds of students, and through the serendipitous realization that many Red Chip Poker team members had backgrounds in education.

So their team got together, spent hours laying out each building block required for a cohesive poker strategy, many hours more debating the ordering of those building blocks, and months crafting every lesson with you – the student – in mind. The end result is the most comprehensive A-Z poker course ever made. With CORE you learn the right material at the right time to walk away with a future-proof strategy that you can understand, internalize, and actually use.

An additional 100+ lessons were added atop the original 100+ lessons to form CORE 2.0, plus each and every one of the original lessons has been updated and refreshed as well.

This may seem like overkill, but think about a recent hand where you bluff 3-bet. Even to do something so mundane you would need to understand the basic building blocks behind the play, namely:

• Hand reading the range your opponent raised
• Positions, and how they can influence folding frequencies
• The break-even % when bluff 3-betting
• How blockers can increase the profitability of bluffing
• If opponent calls your 3-bet, how and when to bluff c-bet the flop
• If opponent 4-bets, how and when to 5-bet over the top

There are many things to know and consider before running any given poker play, but CORE is there with lessons on all of those (as well as 200+ other lessons!).

Poker Instruction Ought to Imitate Higher Education Methodology

Consider a non-poker real world example. Suppose you enroll in college and declare a major in physics. You will be given a list of required physics courses as well as some electives. In addition, there will be required math classes that provide you with the tools you need to solve physics problems. You’ll also be compelled to take laboratory classes to better understand experimental methods, and a statistics class or two so you can analyze experimental data.

Across thousands of further education institutions worldwide, your path will be quite similar. In addition to learning the necessary mathematical techniques, you’ll first be introduced to basic mechanics, followed by electricity and magnetism. Next up you’ll likely encounter wave motion and optics and the rudiments of quantum physics. As this process continues, the curriculum may diverge, but most will include solid state physics and fully-fledged quantum mechanics, along with special and general relativity.

So if a physics professor were to pick up a physics major syllabus from any accredited institution and looked at the year-by-year course listings, she would almost certainly see a curriculum similar to the one offered by her own department. Why is this?

Universities have been teaching physics for hundreds of years. Sure the advanced courses have evolved as we’ve learned more about the universe, but what a student needs to know, and the rough order in which they need to learn it, has been hammered out through trial and error. Perhaps most importantly, we have confidence that the standard curriculum works, simply because it produces physicists who upon graduation can accomplish the tasks required of physicists.

This is the exact approach that Red Chip has taken with CORE!

By breaking down poker into its constituent elements, CORE aims to present this complex and nuanced game in manageable modules. Lessons build on one another and are supplemented by quizzes. An active discussion area involving subscribers and the content producers reflects Red Chip Poker’s commitment to community-based learning. The people who’ve compiled the course have taken the conscious step of asking what a poker player needs to know in order to succeed, and presenting that material hierarchically in a manner similar to a university curriculum.

As part of the CORE 2.0 update, numerous new hand breakdowns have been added in both the cash game and tournament realms to help you further enhance your capabilities and decision-making processes in a bevy of different spots you’ll face.

Other additions you’ll get as part of the CORE 2.0 update include a 12-video cash game course by Ed Miller and a 22-video tournament course by WSOP bracelet winner (and Cardplayer Lifestyle contributor) Chris Wallace exploring modern tournament strategy.

One of the novel and central devices of the curriculum also has a physics-inspired theme: the Periodic Table of Poker Elements.

DOWNLOAD: Full-size copy of the “poker periodic table of elements”

As the name suggests, this breaks down poker into its fundamental constituent parts. Moreover, like the conventional Periodic Table, the exploration of how those parts fit together gives a deep understanding of how all the elements of poker combine to produce a complete, winning strategy.

The scientific method relies on the interplay between theory and practice. Similarly, the CORE program emphasizes both:

• Level I lessons lay out the basic elements of poker
• Level II lessons expand upon that material and extend into more sophisticated concepts
• Level III lessons bring it all together with real-world hand examples that illustrate the concepts in action.

See the entire CORE syllabus here.

And like any successful course, the quizzes allow students to assess their progress and return to material when they need more practice.

Red Chip Poker’s CORE 2.0: Pricing

Costing just $5/week makes this poker course one of the most affordable poker training products on the market. The only prerequisites are that you can handle enough arithmetic to balance a checkbook, and that you have the desire to succeed. The course allows relative beginners a comfortable entry point into poker training, but also offers loads of value to more seasoned players who can proceed rapidly through the more basic material to the more advanced lessons.

If all of the above seems a lot to digest, here is a quick video of the philosophy behind CORE and its content:

The fact that you can sign up for CORE today and get started for the same low price of just $5 especially after the plethora of updates to the course added in the 2.0 update is truly incredible. Your bankroll will thank you!