Red Poker
If you’re someone just starting your poker journey or have been playing for a little while but need a way to approach your game from a more methodical and organized point, the Red Chip Poker CORE course might be just the thing for you.
Envisioned as a fairly extensive starter pack for poker players, the CORE training program offers everything you need to improve your performance at the tables. From the very basics to more complex and advanced concepts, this course can take you from a mere beginner to a very solid player.
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- This award-winning selection dazzles the landscape with 8-inch spikes of vibrant flowers, appearing a month earlier than most varieties. The stunning blooms, a mixture of yellow, orange and fiery red, are excellent as cut flowers. A fiery addition to the landscape or container gardens. An herbaceous perennial.
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The good thing about RCP CORE is that is quite broad. It doesn’t focus on a particular game type. Many concepts and ideas explained inside can be applied to tournaments, cash games, and sit and go’s alike. The main idea behind this program is to provide you with a solid foundation for you future growth.
Although this course doesn’t contain any earth-shattering secrets that you couldn’t find elsewhere with some research, its value stems from the fact you’re provided with a nicely structured and organized lessons that take you one step at a time. For a beginner, this structure is very important as it helps save time and provides a manageable learning curve.
Table Of Contents
- CORE Level 1: The Fundamentals
- Level 4: Take Your Pick
Red Chip Poker CORE at a Glance
The RCP CORE course is mainly taught by James ‘SplitSuit’ Sweeney, the main guy behind the Red Chip Poker project, and Adam ‘W34Z3L’ Jones, an accomplished player in his own right and a very experienced coach.
The red hot poker is a member of the liliaceae family which is home to common lilies. These drought and heat tolerant perennials do well in the heat of mid summer, long after some of the other plants in your garden have started to suffer from the heat. If you live in an arid area, it is the ideal plant for you. The plant is native to South Africa.
The course is divided into several different levels. The first two focus more on the game theory and explain everything you need to know to play solid poker. You’ll learn about important math concepts, hand ranges, betting ideas, and more.
The third level contains hand analysis. Going through various hands played by RCP members and, you’ll get to see how many of these theoretical concepts are actually useful in practice.
The final level of the course contains two modules: one is devoted to tournament play and the other one covers cash games. Taught by Ed Miller (cash games) and Chris Wallace (tournaments), this is the latest addition to the CORE program that really adds a lot of value to it. You are free to watch both modules, of course, but you can also focus on the one that you’re more interested in.
The best way to go through CORE is by following the order of lessons as they are presented in the course. That way, you can be sure you won’t miss out on any important concepts along the way. This is especially true if you are a beginner and don’t know much about poker strategy at all. Simply put your trust into the course creators and let them slowly take you on the path of becoming a better player.
CORE Level 1: The Fundamentals
Every poker journey has a beginning and CORE starts with very basic mathematical concepts. These are things every player needs to know about, such as pot odds, equity, EV (expected value), and more.
You won’t feel overwhelmed even if you don’t know the first thing about Hold’em besides rules. CORE is a course that is designed in great part for the beginners so it takes things really slowly.
You won’t find any complicated formulas or calculations in the first math lessons. These would be pretty pointless at this stage. Instead, you’re offered some simple but very useful ways to make quick calculations to help you make better decisions. Most of these principles really aren’t hard to learn and understand and you’ll be able to adopt them easily with some experience.
Betting & Hand Ranges
After laying out poker math fundamentals, CORE moves on to another important segment, namely betting. Structuring your bets, sizing them properly, and knowing when to bet is essential to poker success. In this section, you’ll learn about things such as:
- Stack-To-Pot Ratio (SPR)
- Bet sizing fundamentals and conventions
- Bluffing, etc.
All lessons take between 10 and 30 minutes and explain these important ideas you’ll need to know about moving forward. Understanding how betting works in poker and how you need to think about it isn’t as simple as you might think but, luckily, it isn’t so complex that you couldn’t figure it out, either.
In the next section, you’ll learn basics about poker hands. You’ll find out what ranges are, what they look like, and how you can use this knowledge to determine your opponents’ likely holdings. Don’t worry if you don’t even know what a “range” is, as everything is explained slowly and methodically.
Preflop & Postflop Play
With some of the main theoretical elements out of the way, the RCP CORE course finally moves on to the actual play. The next two segments in the course deal with your decisions before and after the flop. Of course, these lessons tie to the previous ones and many of the concepts explained earlier are integrated into the discussion.
In the preflop section, you’ll get a simple and concise plan on how to correctly select hands (i.e. range construction) to play and how to deal with some common situations before the flop. The final lesson of the preflop section takes things up a notch and discusses how your opponent are likely to think when figuring out their opening ranges. This may sound a bit complicated right now but if you’ve been paying attention to the things explained up to this point, it shouldn’t be too hard to follow.
The postflop section continues on the preflop discussion as your decision before the flop will heavily influence all the later streets. Some of the things you’ll learn about are different types of flops and how these differences should influence your decisions. Not all flops are the same and being able to quickly recognize major groups of flops can be very beneficial to your game.
In this section, you’ll also learn about ways to extract value from your hands. This can be a tricky thing to figure out as you need to understand how often you can bet and expect to get called with the worse hand. So, it’s one of the longer lessons in this segment but it is definitely one of the most important.
Cognition
The final segment of Red Chip Poker CORE Level 1 is called Cognition and it deals with the things that aren’t as tangible. It is what’s often referred to as “mental game” in poker books and videos. I’d suggest watching these videos if you’re serious about getting ahead in poker as they explain some very interesting concepts and situations that you’ll likely come across if you play for a while.
These lessons will help you with the best ways to study your hands and improve your play away from the felt. You’ll also learn how to best deal with your own mistakes and not let them weigh on you too much. You may not have aspirations to become a poker pro but having a professional attitude towards the game is required if you want to succeed at any meaningful stakes.
CORE Level 2: Turning Up the Heat
As you progress to the Level 2 of the CORE course, you’ll start to enter a slightly more advanced territory in your growth. Some of the concepts and ideas discussed in the lessons in these segments could definitely be of value to more experienced players as well.
The second level is structured in the same way as the first one, i.e. it contains the same modules (except for the betting, which was pretty well covered in the first section). So, you’re going back to the same areas of the games but this time around looking at them with new eyes and in light of the knowledge obtained from the initial lessons.
So, in the Math II module, you’ll expand your knowledge with things such as implied and revers implied odds, blockers, ICM, game theory, combos and equities, and much more. At this stage, you may come across some ideas that you aren’t quite clear about but don’t worry about it. Take your time with the lessons and continue playing applying things you do know. Eventually, it will all make sense.
Similarly, when talking about ranges in this module, the discussion turns more to balances, frequencies, and things such as capped and polarized ranges. You’ve probably had a chance to hear some of these expressions at least in a poker commentary but now you’ll get a full explanation of what they are and how you can utilize them on the felt.
The preflop and postflop sections of Level 2 are really quite extensive and valuable. It is clear that a lot of time and effort has been put into these. The preflop part is much more extensive and covers things like:
- Effective stacks
- Limping
- 3-betting and trapping
- Playing in straddled pots
- Stealing and re-stealing, and more
The postflop section is even more extensive as it covers a really wide spectrum of topics. One of these is continuation betting, which is really discussed at length as one of the more essential plays you’ll have to resort to and deal with all the time.
Other than this, you’ll learn about how to plan things ahead and what things to consider when planning your line in a hand. At this point, if you watched all the earlier videos with attention, things will really start to fall into place and you’ll start to realize how all these different segments come together.
Finally, in the Cognition segment, you’ll learn more about things you can do to further push your edges. Here, CORE lessons discuss things like table image, player profiling, live reads, and emotional swings. These may sound a bit abstract at the moment if you’re not experienced with poker but do take time to watch them. As you play more, you’ll definitely start to understand what these are all about.
Level 3: It’s Time to Look at Some Hands
As mentioned at the very start of this Red Chip Poker CORE review, the third level consists of various hand reviews. These are organized by types (cash games, tournaments, and live cash games) and broken down by further elements, such as stack depth.
The hands are reviewed in the form of short video lessons accompanied by written articles. All of the hands originate from RCP members, so you can see examples from various games and players of all skill levels. This is quite useful for the learning process and probably beats looking into hands played by professionals.
What’s also quite useful is that you’ll find links to lessons covering certain topics covered in specific hand reviews. That way, you can quickly refresh your knowledge and fill in any gaps without having to spend any time searching through the lessons.
Level 4: Take Your Pick
The Level 4 of Red Chip Poker CORE represents the latest addition to this course and clearly shows that this is a living entity that creators want to keep fresh and valuable for new and existing members alike.
This section contains two modules: one on live cash games and one on tournaments. At this point, you probably have a good idea about what games you prefer to play and CORE gives you a chance to further expand your knowledge on your preferred choice.
Live Cash by Ed Miller
If you want to conquer live cash games, this is probably not a bad pick. Live games offer a lot of great opportunities and are generally much softer than online tables. And, with this extensive module taught by Ed Miller, you’ll be well on your way.
The module actually represents the adaptation of Miller’s book The Course and offers an excellent guide to take you from $1/$2 to $5/$10 games. Armed with the knowledge from previous modules and with a number of lessons specific to live games, you’ll be able to really fast-track your poker career.
Tournaments by Chris ‘Fox’ Wallace
If you’d rather try your hand playing tournaments, the segment on tournament play by the WSOP-bracelet winner Chris ‘Fox’ Wallace provides everything you need to get you started on the right path to success.
This, too, is a very extensive module covering a wide array of topics you’ll need to study if you want to become a good tournament player. Of course, everything you’ve learned up to this point will be invaluable but Wallace focuses on many tournament-specific aspects and gives you a detailed blueprint to crushing MTTs.
How Valuable is Red Chip Poker CORE, Really?
Figuring out the value of a poker training site can sometimes be quite tricky. How do you decide if a particular program is worth the money and if your investment will pay off? And, in general, these are legitimate questions.
With the Red Chip Poker CORE program, however, this isn’t an issue.
You can get in for as little as $5 a week and you’ll have access to all the content described in this review. If you’re a beginner looking to build your game and become better at poker, I don’t think you’ll find anything better out there for this price.
The structure of the course and the quality of the lessons make this a really easy decision, especially with all the content updated recently and two brand new modules added to the mix (which could be full courses of their own). If you’re serious about getting better at poker and don’t know where to start, this is it. It might be the best $5 you’ve ever spent in your in your life.
If you don’t like it for whatever reason, you can always cancel your subscription, no questions asked. But the initial fiver will definitely be well worth it, even if you only watch a few select videos.
The red hot poker is a showy and dramatic plant. If you love growing perennials that give color all summer long, this is the plant for you. Other names for this showy plant are torch lily and poker plant. The botanical name for this plant is kniphofia uvaria and there are more than 70 known species of it.
The red hot poker is a member of the liliaceae family which is home to common lilies. These drought and heat tolerant perennials do well in the heat of mid summer, long after some of the other plants in your garden have started to suffer from the heat. If you live in an arid area, it is the ideal plant for you. The plant is native to South Africa.
Growing a Red Hot Poker plant is very easy.
Want a showy flower in your garden? Try red hot poker plants! Click To TweetSunlight
Red hot poker plants like sunlight. I originally had one planted in a semi sunny location and it was always reaching for the sunlight. Plant it in full sunlight and watch it really grow! This plant is a tough summer bloomer that does well in the hot days of summer.
Soil
Although not particularly picky about soil, red hot poker does seem to do well in loose soil that drains well. It will benefit from the addition of organic matter, such as compost, before planting.
Watering
This perennial actually likes the soil to be a bit dry as long as it is not TOO hot. If it sits in wet soil, the crown of the plant can easily rot. They don’t need a lot of watering, but you should take care to keep an eye on the watering during the hottest days of the summer. This torch lily plant is in my hottest garden border and does not need much watering, but I set up a sprinker when the days get really hot.
Flowers
The flower spikes start to appear in the spring. They have a muted color and are smaller at first but soon become rich with color and shape. The flowers are quite long lasting.
If you take care to deadhead the spent flower stalks, it will continue blooming all the way through to fall. This means that you can use the blooms for cut flowers indoors! The most well known color is red, of course, but red hot poker flowers also come in shades of yellow, coral, cream and yellow. My flowers start out yellow and turn to bright orange and yellow when they mature.
It is easy to see where the common name for kniphofia uvaria comes from. The flowers really do have the look of a burning torch!
Hummingbirds love to feed on torch lily plants. See how to grow them. Click To TweetSize
A mature red hot poker plant can be quite large. The one I have in my southwest garden bed that is about 3 feet wide now and it is only 3 years old. They can tolerate a bit of crowding. In addition to leaving room for the widely spreading crown, the plant also needs height, since the blooms can be as high as five feet.
Leaves
The leaves of red hot poker plants are long and slim, very much like the look of a daylily.
Propagating and hardiness zones.
Propagation
Red hot pokers can be grown from seeds. If you plant from seed, be sure to allow 18 to 24 inches between the seeds to give them room to grow. Cold stratification of the seeds is a good idea before planting for best results. You can purchase seed or collect them from the pods of mature plants. Be sure to let them dry out before trying to plant them.
Generally, these plants are propagated from divisions of a mature plant. Fully grown plants should be divided every three to five years for better flower production. The plants will also send off offsets that can be divided and planted separately. Division is generally done in early spring or late fall. Plant divisions just below the soil level.
Hardiness Zones
Red Poker Chip
Torch lily does well in zones 5-9. In the colder zones, be sure to lay down 2-3 inches of mulch before winter to protect the crowns of the plant.
Uses for Red Hot Pokers
Where you find this plant you are also likely to find hummingbirds. They love the bright colors of it and sweet nectar, and are attracted to the tubular shape of the flowers. Birds, bees and butterflies are also attracted to it. The plant is moderately deer resistant. (if there is such a thing!)
After blooming has finished for the season, don’t cut back the foliage. Let it in place so that it will nourish the roots for the next season. Once the cold weather really starts to come in the fall, (or early the next spring) is a good time to remove the foliage.
With some easy care and the right spot, red hot pokers will give you season after season of vibrant color and hummingbird attracting flowers.
Red Poker Plant
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