"Little Makes Another Big Finish" and other cliché plays on the name "Little" along similar lines have been making their rounds throughout 2007. It's a pretty safe bet, however, that Jonathan Little, the fresh-faced poker pro who's been inspiring such headlines, isn't getting tired of reading them.
Little, who will turn 23 in December, started out by playing in $5 tournaments and 25¢-50¢ cash games with his friends while earning $10 an hour at his day job. He now regularly buys into $2,000 online sit-and-gos and $10,000 to $20,000 live
tournaments and leaves them hundreds of thousands of dollars richer. He made that huge leap in just a matter of years, and 2007 has been the most successful year of his life (so far) in regard to poker. He kicked off his meteoric rise by making the final table of the
PokerStars Caribbean Adventure in January. He finished in fifth place there and retired to the beaches with a paper umbrella in his drink and $318,000 in his pocket.
Little had no intention of stopping there, though. He went on to tackle the
Mirage Poker Showdown main event and bested a tough final table that included the likes of Phil Ivey, Amnon Filippi, Darrell Dicken, Jon Friedberg, and Corey Carroll to win his biggest payout to date - $1.1 million. That win was enough to inspire him to pack up and move to Las Vegas, the poker hub of the world, in an attempt to build upon his lifetime winnings, which currently sit at more than $2.5 million.
Card Player recently caught up with Little, hot off his second-place finish to Scott Clements in the
North American Poker Championship in Canada, a finish that boosted him into second place in the
Card Player Player of the Year (POY) standings. He has made nine final tables this year and is now just 138 points behind POY leader David Pham - within arm's reach of one of poker's most coveted titles.
Shawn Patrick Green: You recently did very well in the
North American Poker Championship at Niagara Falls. Tell us about some of the key hands that you played.
Jonathan Little: Well, I didn't actually get ahold of any hands. There was one hand in which David [Cloutier] limped, Scott [Clements] limped from the small blind, and I checked from the big blind. I had 5-4 offsuit, and the flop came 8
7
6
, so I flopped a straight. Scott checked, and I bet about the size of the pot, a little less. Dave folded and Scott called pretty quickly. So, I figured him to be on maybe a pair or straight draw of some sort. The turn was the 3
, so I still had the same straight. Scott checked, and I bet 400,000. He had about 1.6 million total, so it was a pretty big bet, but I wanted to put the pressure on him if he had a flush draw, because I thought that he might make a slightly negative EV [expected value] call with a flush draw. He called, the river was the K
, and he instantly pushed all in. Well, I was pretty sure that he had a heart-flush draw and that this was just trying to get me off the hand, so I called, and he ended up having the 10
6
, which was a backdoor flush. That knocked me down to about 2 million.
Then, there was another hand when we were threehanded. David had been losing a few hands; he went from being a big chip leader, with around 6 million, to around 2 million. I raised from the small blind, like I had been doing. He normally had been just calling, but this time he looked kind of pissed off and decided to push. I had A-10 suited and was thinking, "He'll push any ace here, because he's kind of tilty." So, I ended up calling, and he had J-9 suited. I won that hand, and it was heads up between Scott and me.
SPG: You started off the year by making the final table of the
PokerStars Caribbean Adventure (
PCA). Did you know right then and there that it was going to be an unusually good year for you?
JL: I had no clue that it was going to be a good year. Before the
PCA, I had a whole year when I played and didn't win anything. I was down like $250,000, which was a lot of money for me; it's a lot of money for anyone. I was getting very nervous, but I eventually took fifth in that, which was great. I didn't really expect to do anything else, and I didn't really do a whole lot else until I chopped a $3,000 tournament at Bellagio with J.C. Tran, and I thought, "Hmm … I'm actually kind of getting better at this."
I really didn't think that it was going to be a good year at all. I thought that it was a random, lucky hit, you know?
SPG: You're biggest score to date was for taking down this year's
Mirage Poker Showdown, for which you won almost $1.1 million. How did your life change after that?
JL: Well, it didn't really change all that much at all. I relocated to Vegas. I was renting a house with a bunch of guys over the summer - for the
World Series of Poker, the
Bellagio Cup, the
Mirage Poker Showdown, and the
Mandalay Bay Poker 
Championship - and I had kind of decided before that whole trip out there that if I happened to do well and win anything significant, I would probably end up relocating to Vegas. I had been living in Pensacola, Florida, and that's not the greatest place for a professional poker player, because you have to fly everywhere to play everything.
SPG: Did your goals in poker change as a result of that win?
JL: Well, certainly. After I won that tournament, I thought, "This is probably going to be the greatest thing that I ever accomplish in poker." And that still might be true, because most people never win a
World Poker Tour title. I guess I wasn't really expecting to do well in anything else, and I would have been OK with that if that's how it happened. But now my goals are to win another
WPT event, of course, and to try to win
Card Player's Player of the Year. I'm second in that right now, by not very much at all. So, hopefully I can make the final table of something and get ahead.
I'd also like to win a
World Series bracelet. I really haven't had much success in the World Series. I think that I know how to play better against the really confident players you see in the
WPT events. At the
World Series of Poker, some of the people really have no clue how to play, and I think that I don't really know how to play against people who really don't know exactly what they're doing. But hopefully I can do better at the
World Series next year.
SPG: Walk us through how you rose through the ranks online.
JL: I wanted to be good, so I started studying poker books - mainly just the stuff that [David] Sklansky wrote, which was probably the greatest thing I ever came upon - and the forums. Without those things, I definitely wouldn't be where I'm at today. I simply put a lot of time into learning the game; I've read probably 80 poker books, and they've all been helpful.
I started playing limit hold'em, because that's basically what the first books I read were about. I read
Theory of Poker, Small Stakes Hold'em, and
Hold'em for Advanced Players [by Sklansky]. So, I played limit and worked my way up to $15-$30 on PartyPoker, but I could not beat $30-$60 for the life of me, which I think was the highest limit at the time on PartyPoker around three years ago.
So, I randomly decided to play some sit-and-gos one day. I was doing really well; I won like $10,000 in a week, or something ridiculous like that, but I ended up losing a lot of it. I started to go back and play $10 sit-and-gos, just for practice, because I pretty much had all of my bills paid for a while, and I had really no stress for money. I decided to play 1,000 games at each buy-in level. I worked my way up to the $100 games, and then got to the $200 games again and never really looked back. I was making a pretty decent amount of money every month, and I was happy with it. It gave me enough money to play the live-tournament circuit once I turned 21.
SPG: How was your transition from online poker to live poker?
JL: Well, like I said, the whole first year, I didn't win anything. So, I guess I just learned by trial and error, which is usually the most expensive way to learn anything in poker. I think that when I first started playing, I played tournaments exactly like I played sit-and-gos, which is really, really tight, and that's just not the way to do it.
The very first live tournament that I played was some $500 event in Tunica, Mississippi, and I ended up finishing like 23rd out of 3,000 entrants. It was a huge field; I think it was the largest field ever, aside from a World Series event, at the time.
After that, I thought, "Man, this is going to be really easy." And then I proceeded to lose everything that I played for the entire next year. I thought, "Man, maybe I'm just terrible at this." But I practiced online a lot. I finished second in the
Sunday Million on PokerStars right before the
World Series two years ago. If I hadn't done that, I probably wouldn't have even played in the
World Series that year.
You just have to sit there and pay attention. It's really hard to sit there and pay attention for a lot of online guys, because they're so used to having 12 tables to pay attention to, whereas live, you have only one table, and it's going superslow. You need to figure out how to focus, and once you do that, it becomes a lot easier.
SPG: You run a video training site called SNGIcons.com, which focuses on sit-and-go play. Is there a specific way of playing sit-and-gos, especially at the lower stakes, that will pretty much guarantee profits over the long haul?
JL: Yeah, you just have to play very tight early and very, very loose late, once the blinds get high.
SPG: What are the biggest mistakes that you see a lot of sit-and-go players making?
JL: A lot of sit-and-go players end up playing very loose in the early levels of the game because they think, "I have 50 big blinds, so I can afford to lose some of it." In poker, you really can't afford to lose anything. You have to try to keep all of the chips that you have. They also play way too tight late. They think, "If I play tight, I can barely get into the money." Generally, that's not the way that you should be thinking. You need to be thinking, "These other guys are playing too tight, to try to get into the money, so I'm going to try to steal all of their chips." At the low-level sit-and-gos, you'd be surprised how often you can get threehanded with something like a 7-to-1 chip advantage over the other two players.
SPG: What kind of bankroll do you need, and what sort of ROI [return on investment] is realistic?
JL: Well, it depends on the buy-in of the game. In the largest buy-in games, like the $2,000 sit-and-gos, you may have a 2 percent ROI, but you also get things like rakeback or frequent player points, which add a huge amount to your winnings. When I played on PartyPoker, half of my money came from rakeback, just because I paid a huge amount of rake in sit-and-gos.
In the lower-stakes games, you probably can get 10 percent or 15 percent ROI, and that's really pretty decent money. Let's say you're playing $10 sit-and-gos. You need probably 100 buy-ins, so let's say you have $1,000; if you play 3,000 games a month, you're going to make $3,000. If you make about $1 a game, you've already quadrupled your bankroll in just one month of playing.
One hundred buy-ins is usually plenty if you have a 10 percent ROI. In the bigger games, if you have only a 2 percent ROI, you're going to have really big upswings and downswings, so you may need to have more like 300 buy-ins.
SPG: Who is the live-tournament pro whom you've gained the most respect for on the live-tournament circuit?
JL: I pretty much respect all of the guys who are calm and nonemotional, guys like Phil Ivey and Barry Greenstein, and some of the young guys, like Shannon Shorr and Scott Clements. They don't stand up and yell and scream like maniacs when they win a hand, and that just shows that they have the emotional stability not to really get upset when they lose.
They also don't go on what I call "happy tilt" when they win. They don't win a hand and suddenly think that they can win every other hand for the rest of the tournament. I see a lot of players do that; when they win a big hand and then another big hand, they think that they're invincible, and then they go on to lose all of the chips that they won.
SPG: Ideally, where will you end up in life, and how big a role do you see poker playing in it?
JL: Poker is basically my whole life. I pretty much just travel around and play poker. I still enjoy the game, and as long as I enjoy it, I'll be playing it. It kind of becomes a job at times, and that makes you not enjoy it nearly as much. It's important to enjoy what you're doing, although you have to kind of realize that it is your job, and you still have to put in the hours, whether or not you want to.
I think I'll play poker … I guess as long as I feel like it, pretty much. I'm trying to get enough money to where I can retire whenever I feel like it, and I think that once I get to that spot, I will be content with whatever I feel like doing. I guess I'll make that decision whenever I get there.
