Jonathan Little: WPT Player of the Year, 2X WPT Champ, & Founder of PokerCoaching.com

“Pokers legendary champions, next generation stars and tireless ambassadors of the game, sharing their wisdom and guiding your journey to high achievement on the Greenfeld. This is chasing poker greatness with your host Brad Wilson…”

 

Brad Wilson  0:31  

Welcome welcome. Welcome to another episode of the chasing poker greatness podcast. As always, this is your host the founder of chasing poker greatness.com. Coach Brad and on today’s show, we break the thermometer and watch the mercury spill out all over your brand new crocs. What a waste of mercury as I am very pleased to welcome back the one and only human in the world who can say they’re my boss, the great Jonathan little strap into your seat because today’s conversation is going to cover a playing poker, teaching poker, learning poker and learning from poker. J L is a powerhouse in the poker community as he has over 7 million and live MTT caches is a two time WP T champ is the season six WP T A player of the year and works so hard he makes me feel like I’m asleep at the wheel. He boasts a weekly blog has at least two podcasts publishes multiple YouTube vids per week and has built his baby poker coaching.com into one of the most dominant poker training forces on the market. Oh, and remember the last time we spoke and Jonathan told me with the straight face, he wouldn’t write another book. Me too, but it appears the man just can’t help himself, as he’s recently wrapped up yet another eventual poker classic, which means that count is now up to 15 best selling book or strategy books. In today’s conversation with the founder of poker coaching.com, you’re going to learn how a homeless dude in a junkyard was a catalyst to Jonathan’s poker career adjustments you want to make when playing against weaker opponents. How Jonathan manages to continue to find stuff to write about, and much much more. And before you dive into this episode with Jay L, I wanted to take a moment to let you know about my latest mini course neutralize river leads in RL is powered by mass data analysis and is a Pay What You Wish mini course so that you can experience the power of MDA and absolutely at no upfront cost. You can grab your copy at chasing poker greatness.com/nrl By joining the daily newsletter. And now without any further ado, I bring to you cardplayer entrepreneur 15 times author and fan favorite, Jonathan little Mr. Little, how you doing, sir?

 

Jonathan Little  3:00  

Great. Thanks for having me on. Happy to be here today with you on the chasing poker greatness podcast. Hello, everyone.

 

Brad Wilson  3:06  

It’s It’s my pleasure having you. You mentioned that you skipped your nap today. So you’re a little worried about your energy levels. But I don’t know I don’t think I’ve ever seen Jonathan Littell dragging ass and low energy ever.

 

Jonathan Little  3:21  

I’ll tell you what the secret is. So normally, I’m in my office doing my thing. Whenever it’s time to be on I raise the standing desk, I get up, put a light on in front of my face, have some water, and that’s like the cue to get going and ready

 

Brad Wilson  3:36  

to go. Yep. queue to exert some energy I have to imagine have to imagine after like, a day of doing like a little coffee a day of doing webinars. I don’t, I assume managing your your enterprise is time consuming, that there are times where you’re actually raising children, right, like raising a family that you just totally crash. And you know, you’re just done.

 

Jonathan Little  4:06  

I think there’s a lot of value in just having a schedule and also mixing it up, right? Like, I don’t take care of my kids all the time. And I don’t write books all the time. And I don’t make videos all the time. But if you mix it up, and also you’ve sort of changed the framing of what you’re doing, like, you know, time to make a video how to do an interview, stand up, get in the zone. I know when I stand up. It’s time to do the work, right? Whenever I sit down to write a book, I know I’m not gonna let anything else bother me. I close everything else on the computer and I do the work right? Yep. Someone just messaged me today, someone who’s very successful, like how in the world do stay on task all the time? And well, the answer is you outsource everything you don’t necessarily want to do. Like I cannot design graphics and save my life. I cannot edit videos especially well. So I outsource all these things to professionals. And I do the stuff that I am uniquely qualified to do. So I have a bunch of different things that I could be doing. I wake up I pick the two or three I want to do that day and I do it and Then you’re you’re excited and motivated to do it

 

Brad Wilson  5:02  

exactly like people ask me, How do you release so many podcasts interviews? How do you crank these out so regularly? And it’s like, Well, for one, I love doing it, I look forward to recording them just as a human being. And to it’s like they’re scheduled. And I’m used to going through the process. And so because of that, like, I just I get in the zone, and then I just do it. And, you know, it does give me a little bit of solace. I was speaking with Justin, who I’m not sure he’s my contact within poker coaching he, I guess I’ll refer to him as my manager. I don’t know exactly what to what to call Justin. But basically, it

 

Jonathan Little  5:42  

goes all the coaches. Yeah, he does it all Justin’s man.

 

Brad Wilson  5:45  

Yeah, he’s the coach Wrangler. But I was, I was telling him like, Man, I just sometimes I’m so overwhelmed that I wish that I could just duplicate myself, like, I wish that I could just clone myself. And like right now, and life would be so much easier. And it did give me some solace that he’s like, you know, Jonathan said verbatim, those that exact sentence just like three years ago, so I was like, okay, at least I’m in good company. And you know, at least I’ve tried to progress to where, you know, I’m outsourcing all the stuff that I’m not very good at, and investing my energy in the stuff that I am uniquely qualified for.

 

Jonathan Little  6:22  

Yeah. And to be fair, you’re in a pretty good spot, and that you have fans, right. So if you reach out to people on social media are your email list and say, Hey, I’m looking for a graphic designer, or whatever you need, people will reply to you. And then you can go through, look at their work. And then find somebody who wants to work with you, it’s very different than if you’re just straight up trying to hire someone for a job, who doesn’t necessarily know poker, or doesn’t necessarily necessarily know you, and the things that you do, because you have your own tone and the way you present yourself, right. And that’s very beneficial for you. Like, it’s beneficial for me. And pretty much everyone who works for me today. Lights, my training content at one point in time. So they were all like, kind of fans to begin with, and they want to be involved because they like what we do. So you’re in a good spot like that where you can find motivated people who

 

Brad Wilson  7:09  

like you. Yeah, people reach out to me all the time. They just want to help for free. Exactly. So I need and take the help. Yeah, right now. I don’t know what I need. I need lots of things. It’s, uh, I’m doing my best to outsource again. You know, I have my virtual assistant Gwen that I’m like, I’m super pumped about, I have another virtual assistant who’s just like, behind the scenes, transcribing all the podcast episodes. So yeah, it’s just, uh, it’s, it takes time to get all these pieces in place. And then when they are, you kind of look like a superhuman because of how quickly you can just release content, because that’s what you’re focused on all day long.

 

Jonathan Little  7:53  

Yeah, I mean, that’s pretty much it. And you got to find the stuff you don’t want to do and have other people do it, especially if they’re good at it, right. And a lot of people are better than me at pretty much everything. All I’m actually good at is making content and writing poker books, not good at a whole lot else. And so I just, I just do those things. You’re good at poker, right? I’m pretty good at poker. Yes, I haven’t played a ton of poker in the last year just on, you know, weekends every once in a while here and there. Because of COVID. I’m excited for poker be coming back, I hear us Poker Open is going to be happening in Vegas in the summer. So hopefully that takes place. If that’s the case, I will definitely be there. And the World Series of Poker is around the corner, that’ll definitely be a place that I go this year to Vegas, getting my vaccine in a week, second, second shot in a week. So I’ll be hopefully good to go and ready to get my gamble on and party.

 

Brad Wilson  8:42  

Good, good for you. I got my second vaccine, and I am I’m ready to get the hell out of my house. Just over it. I do want to touch on something, though, that you mentioned you. I know that as people who have businesses in this space, you don’t have a lot of time to play poker. Do you ever struggle reconciling being a more known as more of a content creator than like an actual poker player.

 

Jonathan Little  9:13  

I mean, I still play a decent amount of poker. Whenever I play, I try to play a lot of volume at like decently high stakes, right? So I’m not grinding all day, every day. Because like at this point, I don’t need to anymore. And I don’t necessarily even want to anymore. I want to play sometimes, if you look at a lot of the recreational players they play when they want to play, which is actually quite nice. It’s nice to not have to play poker to pay the bills. That said, I got all my bills paid by playing poker whenever I was playing live tournaments all the time, because I used to play literally every day for many, many years. So I kind of already did that. And now I’m doing something else. It turns out when you do well in the early parts of your career, you can have a little bit more flexibility to do what you want within reason and the later part of your career. Which I don’t know if I’m in the later part yet. Who knows. But I I still play poker still have good results. So it is what it is. I just happen to be decent at business as well.

 

Brad Wilson  10:05  

Yeah, so I was just, I guess I was just wondering if like you, you ever felt like a loss of identity from being a poker player to moving beyond it, if you ever just had this thought in your mind, like, I just want to go back and just destroyed like, I just want to crush people. Again,

 

Jonathan Little  10:22  

I do feel that sometimes I always think that like, if I did not have a wife and two kids, and nothing else going on, I would love to just sit and grind for like a month, like scoops happening right now, I would love to just go and grind the big tournaments, on stars, and Gigi and party over and grind it out and how, you know, get in there and battle. But I have other things going on a life like a wife and two kids, which takes up a lot of time and I want to be home with my family. Again, going back to the idea of trying to set yourself up for that. Six or eight years ago, I did not have my training site poker coaching.com, I have some training materials out there, which was doing fine. But it was not something that could you know, fully sustain me or whatnot. So I wanted to find a way to be able to stay home and be with my kids who were not born yet. Now I have a two year old four year old. And so I decided to ramp that up. Right. And you know, to be fair, maybe it would not have worked, or maybe it would work, who knows. But I wanted to set myself up to be in as good of a situation as I possibly could be so that I could do the things that I wanted to do. And right now in life, I would like to go grind poker hard, but at the same time, I’d rather be home with my family. So it’s you know, you got it you got to choose, you got to pick and choose to some extent, like there’s a game I like called Magic the Gathering, I would love to be professional Magic the Gathering player, but it’s not gonna be in the cards for me in this life. Because there are many more high value things I could be doing. Like, seeing my kids running poker coaching, comm playing poker, right? It’s like fourth or fifth down the line. And there’s also no guarantee I could even do it right. So sure it’d be cool chirping from the tribe, but it’s just not going to happen because I have priorities, and I tried to prioritize my life reasonably well. But a lot, you have to be careful to not prioritize the thing that only makes the most money because then you may end up not necessarily being so happy. Early in my career, I just played a ton of sitting goes like all day, every day with grind sitting goes on Party Poker. And that won me a bunch of money, but it didn’t necessarily make me happy. And over the course of you know, a few years of grinding, I realized that and adjusted my strategy, my priority sorry for my kids screaming outside. Now, they know we’re doing an interview now. So it’s time for them to start saying

 

Brad Wilson  12:25  

yes, if you close the door, that’s when they want that door to be open and need your attention that they don’t like closed doors. I think to it, it’s something that I guess I’ve been struggling with a little recently, it’s just like, I love playing poker and I love destroying players like, like a part of me is like the competitor in me is like, you know, get in the streets, let’s go. And I’ve been trying to actually play like just only really 2500 to 3000 hands a week of higher stakes. And it’s hard for me to even get in that much volume, just because of all the other things that I have to do. And plus, I’m not going to play if I’m not going to play at the end of the day. Because if I play at the end of the day, my cognitive willpower and energy is very, very low at like 7pm After all this, so I really have to like prioritize it and make it like a thing. And then I just have so many other things going on that are on top of wanting to play poker that, you know, maybe, maybe it’s just it’s a changing of the time for now. And then eventually, you know, things get set in place, and you’re able to just play like more recreationally. And in your case and 20 years down the line. Maybe you can give Magic the Gathering professional player ago because your kids are out of the house and your wife is sick of you. And

 

Jonathan Little  13:53  

at some point, you really can do whatever you want. Hopefully we get there, we’ll see. But I mean, it sounds like you need to perhaps figure out what your priorities are. And maybe the priorities aren’t playing more poker. And you know, what I did before COVID happened is I would do all of the poker coaching.com type work about three weeks per month. And then I would travel and play poker about one week, per month. And when I would go I’d always make sure to go play high value tournaments. So I’m not like going and playing small stakes games where it’s like that I really want to play Not really. So I’m going to play stuff that I know I want to play. I had three weeks at home. So I’m like I’m ready to go play right. And after a week of grinding hard, you know, 1516 hour days every day, I’m usually ready to be done for about a few weeks. So I found that that works out for me where I get to play about as much as I would really like to. I’m never super burnt out or anything and I’m happy with it. But if you’re like jonesing to go play some poker, go play some poker, you’re in a spot in life where you can do that. And if you know your coaching business slides a little bit it’s not the end of the world. Yeah, I know that you want to like write an email every day and do the podcast very frequently and I I know that you think people expect that. And to be fair, some people probably do. But that’s okay. You got to be happy. You have to make sure you’re living your life and enjoying yourself. And if the business stuff becomes a super grind, and you’re not happy, ask yourself why you’re

 

Brad Wilson  15:15  

doing it. Right. Yeah. So what’s interesting is like I say this, but I love doing the business stuff, too. I love coaching, I love making courses. I love all of that, like you said, it’s just a priority thing where it’s like, oh, there’s only so many hours in a day, and I don’t get to do all the things that I want to do. And that’s just Okay, I just have to reconcile that with myself that I’m not going to get to do all the things I want to do. And I do. If I feel like I want to play poker, I will not write a newsletter for a week or two weeks, and just like grind, get that out of my system. And I have a feeling to that when the world opens up a little bit that just because of responsibilities with business and stuff, traveling is going to be a thing that makes a lot of sense, and that I’ll most likely need to do. And I think they’re too I’ll be able to travel to some live events and get in some Live Poker. And so that’ll, that’ll allow me to scratch the itch as well as build a business. But ultimately, my priority right now is building the business, creating a bunch of courses, making all the sales pages getting everything kind of in place, so that I can have more of my days to myself.

 

Jonathan Little  16:25  

You may disagree with this. But I would bet some of those things you just mentioned, you are not the best that you should be outsourcing that stuff. Right? What sales pages, right? I don’t make any sales pages because I mean, I could do it. But people on my team are way better at it than me. And that’s what they’re, that’s what they like doing right. So, you know, maybe some of the stuff you’re doing, you could in theory, outsource. And it’s tough because I realized you may like doing basically everything yourself to some extent. So you’re like, kind of No, I don’t want to I don’t want to get I don’t want to give that to someone else. Yeah. But you’ll find that if you have, let’s say 10 tasks, and you like all of your tasks, and we’re between, let’s say like 100 out of 190 out of 101 of those is the 90, right, and you might as well get rid of the 90. And that gives you more time to do more of the other things that are slightly less things you like even just a little bit more, even though you like all of it to some extent.

 

Brad Wilson  17:14  

Well, the one thing that I have to do is make the courses right, that’s the one thing that like I’m uniquely qualified to do. And like I have people that are asking me like, Hey, Brad, when’s the next one coming out? Like I’m ready to buy, like just a group of people that are just waiting to buy the next thing. So like that, to me ought to be the priority.

 

Jonathan Little  17:36  

Let’s think about this, right? So say you have to make the courses I know to go through and make the PowerPoints takes a decent amount of time to get sims or to get hands takes a decent amount of time. You mentioned Justin earlier, Justin helps me running Sims, anytime I need any GTO stuff ran, I tell Justin roughly what I need. In a few days, I have it right. And I don’t have to touch it. And I do a good job. He’s a very, very strong poker player. And he helps me with that, right? Like I trained him. I wanted him to be my clone. So that, you know, he could basically answer whatever poker issues there were. So you know, he can be a good poker player. And you know, he’s good at that kind of thing. And now like if I have to do a, call it novice type presentation, like on YouTube, I’ll have a 30 minute webinar on a topic that’s not too advanced. Just don’t just make the whole thing, send it to me, I’ll look it over for five minutes. I’m good to go. Because it’s like a super advanced stuff, right? Because everything I make is not designed to be very high level. Because there are a lot of people out there who are not high level, especially on YouTube consuming free content, right. So, I mean, maybe you need to find someone like that to help you out. Right, I’m in the process of working on another giant course that needs a bunch of sins ran Justin’s running, I’m gonna need like 100 of them. And I’m not even gonna touch it, I know he’s going to do a good job. And that’s why it gets paid the big bucks. So you gotta you gotta find people who you can rely on to do some stuff that perhaps you don’t necessarily want to do. Or maybe you’re not the best. Now He’s way better at running DTO centers, and I am so but

 

Brad Wilson  19:04  

oh, there’s a lot of things that I’m absolutely atrocious at and not qualified to do, period. But again, it’s a process of business building and learning and growth. And, you know, I think my hope is that just keep trying to do better from day to day and that eventually figured out the right processes and the right stuff that facilitates growth and gets the shit done that I’m ready to get done.

 

Jonathan Little  19:31  

Fair, you don’t have to do everything. It’s okay to not do everything. I know. I

 

Brad Wilson  19:35  

know. I I know that for sure. And I do try my best to outsource as much as I possibly can. And really, when you’re bootstrapping a business right in the beginning, like when there’s not a ton of revenue coming in, you feel almost obligated to do most of the stuff. And then as the money comes in, there’s this transition to where you’re training and hiring. out like a bunch of different things. And so I think that’s like the phase of business that I’m in where there’s a fair amount of money coming in that I’m able to reinvest into people to get the stuff done that I don’t necessarily want to do and push, you know, push CPG forward. But yeah, give me a give me give me a couple years, man, I’ve only been doing this for like, a year and a half, I mean, a couple of years. And then hopefully, hopefully, I’m doing things in a much more Jonathan little approved way.

 

Jonathan Little  20:29  

I’ll tell you one thing I wish I knew whenever I was first getting started was, I’ve been with my marketing partner, Dan Stanley for a long time, 14 years or something. So me and him would always do, I would make the content, he’d promote the content, he’d make the websites I would do, you know, get me to do interviews and all that stuff. So we pretty clearly knew what we were supposed to be doing. And then over time, we would, you know, eventually bring on, let’s say, one more person to work on something very specific, that’s fine and good. But eventually, as the business start to grow a little bit, I would have lots of people doing lots of little things. But you don’t necessarily want that I don’t think I think you want a few people doing a lot of things. Ideally, I’d rather have somebody working for me full time. That way. I know they’re devoted to me, they’re not trying to find another job on the side or whatever. Because hopefully, you know, I’m paying their bills, no problem, and they’re enjoying their time. And that way, you don’t have to spend a lot of time managing people, because managing people is difficult. For me, at least maybe some people are great at it. But like that, I mean, if you imagine you have, let’s say 10 people doing five hours of work for you per week, and you have to spend an hour with each of them. There goes 10 hours of your time 25% Your time just torched. Whereas if instead you had three people, it would be three hours of your time, right? Absolutely. Try to try to keep it, you want to spread fast, but the same time you want to spread like then,

 

Brad Wilson  21:47  

right? Exactly. Yeah, that’s the thing is like you hire five people to take care of business stuff. And then all of a sudden, you’re answering questions from five people and you’re managing fire, all of a sudden, you’ve created a job for yourself of managing these people. And it’s like, Wait, this is not this is contrary to the goal of what I was trying to accomplish here. So yeah, it’s like, basically, you know, you have to have a system of management in place. It’s, you know, for poker players. It’s a learning process.

 

Jonathan Little  22:15  

Sure, well, eventually, you’ll have someone who just manages people. So I have a guy who manages people guy, Brian, and he does a good job of it. Whatever needs to get done and kind of just goes to Brian, Brian has questions he asked me, I pay attention to everything. I see everything. I chime in a lot. But probably more than you should. Probably, I could just disappear probably. But you know, you want to try to make it as easy for yourself as possible so that you’re doing the things you want to do. We talked about, like I have a bunch of coaches at poker coaching, right? But and I didn’t necessarily want to be scheduling all the webinars and making sure everything’s lined up properly, because we have a webinar every other day or something like that. Yeah. And I want to make sure the content doesn’t clash with each other, right? I don’t want people making content, like the exact same thing on the exact same month or whatever. So like, flooded logistical stuff, right, that I don’t want to do. So find somebody else who’s good at that. Let him do it.

 

Brad Wilson  23:01  

And you do enjoy the process of business building as much as you have. Being a poker player.

 

Jonathan Little  23:08  

I don’t even know if I feel like I’m necessarily building a business. I’m just I’m just showing up and doing the work. I think I like showing up and doing the work. And ideally, I figured out the work that builds the business, right? So I mean, I don’t know, how do you even necessarily gauge building a business in? Well, like, while you’re doing it, right, like, you can look back and say, Look, I had no business five years ago, now I have a business today I built it. Like, I don’t do something today thinking this is going to get me point oh, 1% more business or whatever the business grows each day. You know what I mean?

 

Brad Wilson  23:39  

I mean, like, if you were to wake up 15 years ago, ready to play a full slate of poker tournaments? Like do you find more fulfillment? At the end of your days today, when you’re doing the poker coaching stuff than you did? Back when you were grinding? Yes. And

 

Jonathan Little  23:55  

the reason is, because I feel like I’m helping a lot more people enjoy poker. Whereas in the past, if anything I was helping, I was hurting people’s enjoyment of poker because I was taking their money. So I definitely prefer doing things where you’re interacting with people in a positive way. Whereas at the poker table, it’s kind of adversarial to some extent, and, like helping people enjoy their time, right. And if you know a lot of people enjoy just straight up studying games like poker. And a lot of people like going from not winning a poker to winning a poker. And also, teaching people to get better at poker gives them the potential to win life changing money, even if it’s not a ton of money hourly, let’s say they make 30 bucks per hour live, that’s better than a lot of jobs, especially at a time where you know, maybe a lot of people got laid off right, knowing you have the ability to make 30 bucks an hour playing one free, no limit is quite valuable to a lot of people. And I know I’ve helped 1000s of people achieve that. And that’s nice to know that I’ve given people the potential to make substantial money if they feel like doing that.

 

Brad Wilson  24:55  

Yeah, and I feel the exact same way and I think that’s why the poker code chin gig for me has worked out so well is because we’re in alignment with that very specific thing of. I mean, I was telling my wife that if I had infinite money, then I would still want to wake up and do the things that I do, which is a pretty cool feeling that, you know, you’re kind of I’m kind of living a life that’s true to myself and a fulfilling existence. And that’s just pretty cool that I don’t know of any many other periods in my life where I just knew that I love doing this thing. I love building it. I love being a part of it. And yeah, that’s sort of, it’s really, it’s just really fulfilling, helping people out, especially coming from a world where, you know, you get paid to crush you pay to not to help people out.

 

Jonathan Little  25:51  

Yeah, I mean, I certainly enjoy every everyday that I’m working for the most part, I wake up and ready to do the job. And if there is some job I don’t especially like doing, I’m usually ready to get it off my plate. So I just finished my next book features a professional tournament poker, it’s my first tournament book I ever wrote. 10 years ago, we went back and basically remade the whole thing rewrote the whole thing, combined three books that I had my first three books into one big book. And the writing process was fine and good. The editing process took forever, we had some issues with the images we had. There were just like various small issues, right. And the editing process is always tedious. Something I found that Jonathan little himself has to do is edit these things. Because we have had a really difficult time finding people who are good at writing, who are also good at playing poker, who can catch all of the poker stuff. And I found a few editors who are good at some specific things like some people are really good at looking at the graphs and making sure everything is right, like they’ll find one hand that’s not listed in the graph. Because we have to go through and manually make every Pio solver, send in this book, it’s a big pain, right? So they will come after you if you mess it up. Trust me, I know they will. And books are something that people are, well, it maybe they’re forgiving about mistakes and books, but usually they’re not. And the thing is, if you screw up in a book, you can’t really fix it, because we print 1000s of these things. And if it has an error, it’s a problem. So you got to do your best to try to make sure it has no errors, you have to make sure it looks pretty, you have to make sure the printed version is going to look pretty before you print it. There’s just like a lot of stuff, right? So I’ve been editing slash fit, basically finishing up this book for like, three months now and got it done two days ago. So that’s good. It’s good to get it off my plate. Whenever I had to go through and do more edits. Like I’m kind of tired of doing these edits. But it is what it is, if I recall correctly. In our first CPG conversation maybe a year and a half ago, I remember you saying that you did not want to write any more books that you are done writing books, because it’s it’s such a tedious and difficult

 

Brad Wilson  27:49  

endeavor? Well, to be fair, I

 

Jonathan Little  27:50  

think I actually have this current book pretty much done by then already. So I don’t think I’ve actually started another book project. This is the wrapping up of that thing. I started a while back because we knew the 10 year anniversary was coming and DNB poker is not put out like a giant tournament book in a long time. So might as well might as well do that, right? So I knew that was coming the I basically went through and rewrote the whole thing. But that wasn’t so difficult. The actual writing process is not so hard. For me, it’s kind of just like talking, like me here talking to you. I know it can barely get a sense of someone else sometimes. But it’s not so hard, right. And writing is not so hard for me for whatever reason, because I’ve read all these books back here. So it’s not so hard for me. And because of that I don’t mind the writing process. But the editing and cleaning up processes is tedious. And I don’t especially love it. But that’s something that I know I’m better at than most people because I know how to write and I know how to play poker. So those are the skills you need for that. And it’s easier said than done. And it’s very, very tedious. A really

 

Brad Wilson  28:49  

long time ago, maybe three years ago, I had a different podcasts. And I had an author on the show her name’s VE Schwab, who’s actually pretty famous now I think her her latest book is like number six on all of Amazon. It has like 20,000 reviews or just something absurd. But she told me that basically, when it comes to writing that the first draft of anything is sort of like the sand, right? It’s just the sand that you’re building something from and then everything is built in the editing process afterwards, which, like you said, can be tedious can take a lot of time. And yeah, I know that. Like when I write my newsletters, I can crank out the rough draft. 15 minutes flat and then the rest is just like the editing going back and making sure that I’m happy with the way everything is actually takes longer than just getting the words on the page.

 

Jonathan Little  29:44  

Yeah, it’s true. And every time I finish a book, I tell myself, I’m not doing that again. But then some other project falls in my lap and we do it.

 

Brad Wilson  29:52  

Yeah, I don’t believe you. You’re gonna be writing books when you’re 90 years old.

 

Jonathan Little  29:56  

You just have literally no books in the work right now. I do I have on my desktop on my computer over here, I have nine different files for books, I book ideas. So I have nine ideas that I think are all viable, then I have a book ideas folder that has like 15 ideas that those are not quite as viable. So anyway, nine things I could write, maybe I’ll get bored and decide to start writing something in about two or three months. That’s how it goes, right? I find something I want to do I grind it hard. And then I’m kind of over it. And then I’m ready to do it again in a few months. It’s like playing poker to some extent, right? Yeah, I want to play a lot for a week. And then I want to be done for a week or two,

 

Brad Wilson  30:31  

you forget how painful it was to you, the pain goes away, and you’re like, I think I want to do that. Again.

 

Jonathan Little  30:37  

It’s like, only painful towards the end, when I’m just like, kind of over it. I guess I get over stuff, I get over stuff after, after a week or two of doing it 16 hours a day, every day or whatever it ends up being.

 

Brad Wilson  30:47  

I don’t know about you. But in my experience, too, like, this is a pitfall and a weakness for me, is that when I’m done with something, I’m like, done with it. I’m like, Oh, I’m like, I’ve worked on this for like two months straight, I’m done. And then like, that means that the promotion process and the marketing process isn’t as strong as it otherwise would be. So basically, like, I need somebody to market and promote this thing, because what I’ve done with it, like I’ve devoted everything to this project, and it’s done, and I’m like, Yeah, I just want to be, I want to be over this thing. I want to put it in the rearview mirror. So yeah, that that’s certainly an area where like a marketing team would be very, very helpful for me.

 

Jonathan Little  31:29  

Or just realize these are different tasks. And you know, after task one of let’s say writing the book, now Task Two is promoting the book. View it is yeah, you did finish writing the book, you did not finish promoting the book that you haven’t even started that that’s the next job. So you alternate jobs to some extent. Yeah, I

 

Brad Wilson  31:48  

think about it, like having a multiple personality disorder, where it’s like, okay, Brad, you’re like in coaching mode right now. And then, okay, now you just need to change personalities and go into salesman mode. And like, that’s just how I think of it is like the different, like you said, different jobs and especially like for business owners. You have to wear a lot of hats, you you know, you have a lot of responsibilities, and you just you can’t get away from it. Like you can’t say, oh, I want to start a business, but I hate selling things. Well, how the hell do you plan on making money out of your business, if you hate selling, you got to find

 

Jonathan Little  32:22  

a partner, right? Who loves selling. That’s what it amounts to. I mean, going back to the multiple hats thing, a good example of this is I have this tournament masterclass, came out on poker coaching about six months or so ago. And it took like, literally six months to get the PowerPoint and really good shape. It’s very, very long. I don’t know 3000 slides 2000 slides. Oh, I like a lot. It took forever, way longer than I thought it would. And I was I was over it. By the end. I’m like a felon, Justin just, you know, finish this thing up, man. I don’t want to touch this anymore. I’m over it. And but then after that, that took forever, but then it was recording time. And I was ready to record because I was tired of like grinding this PowerPoint, trying to like make it look pretty trying to get everything organized properly, etc. Right. And so then it was recording time. And then the thing ended up being like 45 hours long. So you know, that probably took a month to record. So we had six months of making this PowerPoint. And we had a month of recording after that I was done with that, you know, and that is marketing time I have a marketing team. So that’s good. That’s not on my plate. You have a million people asking questions, so you got to answer their questions. So then there’s that job. That’s okay. I don’t mind right. I know what I signed up for.

 

Brad Wilson  33:30  

Exactly. It’s it’s part of the process. And I mean, it’s like just playing poker, right? Like, you’re gonna have good days, you’re gonna have bad days. And ultimately, you’re just trying to have more good than bad and just keep on putting one foot in front of the other.

 

Jonathan Little  33:44  

Do your best to enjoy your time is what it amounts to. If you’re not enjoying your time, maybe you should be doing a little bit differently.

 

Brad Wilson  33:48  

Absolutely. And for what it’s worth, I love I love all the things that I do. Sometimes I get a little annoyed, but I think that’s best probably normal with just human beings in general, I’d probably get annoyed doing anything in the world, no matter what it would be, eventually,

 

Jonathan Little  34:04  

you do anything for a long time. Or if you you know, deal with annoying things, you will get annoyed. That’s how it goes. You just have to make sure that you’re making the most of your opportunities, right?

 

Brad Wilson  34:14  

For sure. And I want to go take a time machine, go back a little bit and go like all the way back to the beginning to when you were getting involved with poker. And I want to ask you Who is your biggest influence in getting into poker becoming a poker professional and why?

 

Jonathan Little  34:32  

Getting into poker. I was playing Magic the Gathering tournaments way back then. And there was a guy named Jake who lived in the junkyard he had no money he was homeless. He lived in cars in the junkyard and he decided one day to introduce us to poker tournaments. And we would buy in for 1010 cent value magic cards each so $1

 

Brad Wilson  34:51  

timeout and timeout this Jake guy lives in a junkyard he’s homeless. How are you interacting with him and

 

Jonathan Little  34:57  

he’s just he lives in Magic the Gathering terms he’s quite good at magic. Oh, okay, okay. You would come and play the $10 by magic tournament when 30 bucks before you Buck 50 bucks every week. That’d be his money. He was a very short guy who had gigantic red beard giant red hair. He looked like the guy from Lord of the Rings. You know, I’m talking about the Gimli. Yeah, that’s it looked just like him. It’s anyway. I was friendly with him. We were friends. I would drive him home, give him money for ramen when I was you know, I had a job. I were at an airport getting $10 per hour. So I was I was rich, I guess. And anyway, one day after a magic turn, he said, let’s play this poker tournament. So he basically just beat us for like a month or two straight. And I started studying it because I realized this is clearly a skill game because he’s just winning every time he eats or either he’s cheating or he’s good. Isn’t diligence found out he’s probably just that way better than us. He wasn’t good at what he was better than everybody else who didn’t. And so I started studying, I bought a few poker books studied up on that, but $50 on Party Poker, started playing poker and ran it up. So I have to thank Jake for getting me into poker.

 

Brad Wilson  35:59  

So you’re telling me that Jake, homeless Jake, that lived in a junkyard is the one responsible for Jonathan Littell and this empire that you’ve built for yourself? That’s pretty incredible, actually.

 

Jonathan Little  36:12  

Yeah, yeah. Random. I’ll never know how it’s gonna work out.

 

Brad Wilson  36:17  

Yeah, it is very random. I had Martin Jacobson on, release his episode quite recently. And he told me that he was training to be a chef, and he had a gig lined up in, I believe it was somewhere in Spain, and he was ready to go. And he quit his job. And his connection. For the job. He was supposed to be getting ghosted him just disappeared off the planet. And he never got that Chef job. But he quit his other job. And so he just kept playing poker more. And that that’s how he basically that was what led to him pursuing his career in poker. So it’s very weird how these, like kind of small things are so influential. Yeah,

 

Jonathan Little  37:00  

I mean, you never know what’s going to open a door to something you didn’t necessarily know about, which is why it’s important to try to interact with a lot of people and try to add value. I was talking to Phil Hellmuth about this, I had a interview them on my on my YouTube channel, youtube.com/poker, coaching, check it out. And he basically said something to the effect of, you’re always where you need to be at this point in time, and you need to try to make the most use of this opportunity. And, you know, love or hate feel how but there’s a lot to that, right, like a lot of people squander their opportunities. I know I squandered a lot of opportunities as a young poker player, because I would be sitting there playing live poker with headphones and a hoodie on and sunglasses not talk to anyone, because that was the image I wanted to portray. And while it maybe was a rather strong type image, it also led to me making no friends at the poker table. And that’s not ideal. You’d rather make friends. And no, you can still battle hard at the poker table, but they can help you in life. Right. And there’s there’s a lot of value to that funny enough, the way I met my marketing partner, I just broken up with my fiancee a long time ago, and I was randomly at a casino near my house in Vegas, and I was drinking way too much wine and betting on sports like a degenerate. And they had a $50 Buy in poker tournament. So I randomly stumbled over there and played the $50 mind poker tournament was goofing off having fun. And my marketing partner straight out of college decided to come talk to me and said, Hey, will you make me a training video and we’re trying to sell it? Probably drunk. I said, Sure. So we did that. And it went well. And we’re still together. Now he’s my longest relationship. Another influence that helped me a lot in poker was a guy named Bill Seymour, he’s an older poker player, he played a lot in the 80s and 90s. And he had a site called poker coaching.com, he actually gave it to me after a while. So, you know, we’re friendly. And he’s an older guy, he must be, I don’t know, 75 or something like that at this point. And he told me a lot about this being sane, not being a young, dumb idiot. There’s a lot of value in having an older poker player, or someone who has done it for 20 or 30 years, whoever was telling teach you everything you need to know to not be a fish. And that was very beneficial to because I’m sure I was just I was young and dumb, like most kids are. Yeah, he helped me be a little bit more sane

 

Brad Wilson  39:15  

when we were coming up. I mean, we lacked mentorship, virtual or really any kind of mentorship. You know, we’re just kind of making it up as we go along. Because they we didn’t have access to these kinds of resources that people have access to. These days. It’s hard for me to imagine this drunken Jonathan little D jetting out on sports bets. It’s hard to reconcile the EU today with the EU then it’s kind of hilarious. Really.

 

Jonathan Little  39:46  

Yeah, well, yeah. The good old days, the good old

 

Brad Wilson  39:50  

days.

 

CG Nacz  39:53  

The decision to enter a hand is fundamental to poker strategy, too tight and they know what you have to loose in Jersey to run over the preflop bootcamp from chasing poker greatness is a comprehensive guide to locking down your preflop game and creating true range advantage. Eight days of guided training over 60 optimal ranges and access to a dedicated community of players that will push you a preflop game from a place of weakness to your greatest strength. Go to chasing poker greatness.com/bootcamp Available now.

 

Unknown Speaker  40:40  

Before boot camp I had been playing for maybe 15 years somewhat seriously, always trying to get better jumping from learning program to different learning programs and training site to training site kind of feeling a little bit lost, not really knowing how to go about getting better. And preflop bootcamp just felt like a great starting point, a way for me to move from being a losing player to possibly a winning player. It felt like the right first step.

 

Brad Wilson  41:07  

Once you jumped in boot camp, what was your experience like?

 

Unknown Speaker  41:11  

Well, first off, I realized that I’d been making a lot of mistakes prior to boot camp, kind of learning what Rangers should look like and what hands should be playing in what situations you know, it was it was exciting because I I could see what other people had been doing to me what kind of what I had been missing in my game. And then from there, just the whole camaraderie of everybody that’s signed up working together trying to achieve that goal. You know that that was fun, that’s pushing each other and really helping one another kind of feeling like you’re a part of a team. It was, it was a great experience. I enjoyed the process, and I learned a lot.

 

Brad Wilson  41:46  

What was your experience, like playing cards, post bootcamp,

 

Unknown Speaker  41:52  

it’s a totally different experience. You know, it put me in a position to be successful as opposed to always being behind the eight ball and dead playing catch up. I really feel like it’s, it’s the foundation of a solid poker game. And since bootcamp, I’ve been able to turn a profit and keep building on what I learned there. You know, being able to go back into the group and really work together even after boot camp was over. It’s it’s been awesome.

 

Brad Wilson  42:18  

What’s your sample size of winning post boot camp?

 

Unknown Speaker  42:21  

I think I have so many 1000 Hands played. By now you know, I’m a father and I have a job so I’m not a professional player by any means. That’s my sample size.

 

Brad Wilson  42:34  

preflop bootcamp is the flagship chasing poker greatness training program. If you’d like to dramatically upgrade your preflop game a new bootcamp launches on the last Saturday of every single month. The price is $199 and your link to join is chasing poker greatness.com/bootcamp. One more time that’s chasing the poker greatness.com/bootcamp all one word, or you can click through in the description box of this episode. I have a question. This is somewhat random, unprepared. I have a couple of friends that I made in LA who are just some of my favorite people that I’ve met in poker. Mike Katz, Jesse Yaga NUMA. They’re both crushers I think Mike is like a real estate agent. Now. I’m not I gotta assume Jesse still just crushing the cash game streets. How did you meet those guys? Like because they they’re also very, very close to you along with Shane and shore I believe. Right?

 

Jonathan Little  43:38  

Yeah. So we I have made a few group chats. And there they are in all of them. It’s random, right? There’s like mostly cash game players. I’m a tournament player. But I met them through Shannon shore. It was always a running joke back in the day, like, oh, Shannon, he’s no talk to him. We talk to everybody. So Shannon would always talk to everybody. I was a little bit more shy. Shannon would go make friends with people. And I was good friends with Shannon. So he made friends with him, I would inevitably eventually become friends with him. And I think we all roomed together at the World Series must have been like my second world series out there, I think. I don’t know. Shannon met some friends. So we run with them. And it was a lot of fun. So yeah, they they’re still both in LA. I think they do pretty well. The daily fantasy sports and poker, still live cash games for the most part of the play tournaments, too. Yeah, so I met him through Shane and I met a lot of people I met in poker through Shannon because he had a little bit more success than I did it poker. I guess we had success before I did. We were both playing a lot of sitting goes together. And funnily enough, I met Shannon because he was in the chat box of a $200 mindset and going on Party Poker braiding the fish. And I’m like, sir, don’t break the fish. Send me a message on AIM back in the day. You know, American

 

Brad Wilson  44:49  

messenger is so standard. That’s how that was how I became friends with Vanessa salps was like just chatting at Party Poker chat and like, oh yeah, send me a message on aim and like it. That’s just how That’s just how connections were made in the poker world back then it’s pretty funny thinking, thinking back.

 

Jonathan Little  45:05  

Yeah. And so we became friends talk on instant messenger. He won a seat talk, go play the Aussie millions. And I think he took fourth place or in it or something like that for like 250k, which was tons of money. And then we like the next poker trip, we went to Austria together, that was my first trip anywhere. And then we just started traveling a ton. Like we would always travel together, room together and make good friends.

 

Brad Wilson  45:28  

Having those friends are is so beneficial to the life of a professional poker player, especially if you’re traveling around. I mean, the reason that I mentioned Mike and Jesse specifically because when I met them at the stage of life I was in I was like, in full time, grind. Like I live at the Commerce Casino. I play poker 60 hours a week, I take Sundays off, this is what I do. I don’t go out late at night, I don’t drink. I take care of myself and my body. And Mike and Jesse just weren’t fucking having it. You know, they did. They were just like, they just were not having it. They’re like, No, you’re gonna go out tonight with us, you’re gonna have dinner, we’re gonna drink, we’re gonna have fun. And I’m like, I don’t want to know you will. And it turned out to be just such a blessing. Just getting, you know, introduced and making friends with all the other players that were playing in those relationships in that time is it was just so valuable, right? It’s so like, it’s such an obvious thing that human relationships have a value. But when you’re just in this grind, I’m going to make money mode. Sometimes you can prioritize that over friendships and relationships, but I have no idea how much money I won or lost in those days. But I do know that those friendships mean more than all the money that was won or lost.

 

Jonathan Little  46:49  

And that is true. I’ve never really sat down and thought about it, but like, they’re really good friends actually, I messaged cats and Shannon just the other day to say, if I die will you teach my wife how to get my cryptocurrencies off my computer. And I mean, like for like, those are the two people I messaged. Because and that’s it’s good to have people who you know, you can trust to not not run off with your cryptocurrency money and do the right thing, even if you’re dead. And you know, maybe I’m wrong, maybe they will run off like, now, we have it here for forever. I can’t do this. It’s documented so I can track them down. I’ve never really thought about it in terms of though I gave up perhaps some money, perhaps because you know, play hung over here a day or two or you play tired and there to an exchange for making a good lifelong friends. But I suppose that is that’s the trade off I made as well. Of course, though, you have to make sure you do not go overboard. There are a lot of poker players who have the grind mode like you did for a while or like I did, and then they just completely go off the deep end and they want to go party all the time. This happens to a lot of people at the World Series of Poker, they go out there to Vegas, they fully plan on playing all summer, they’re gonna grind hard, they play for a week, either they get rich, or they get broke one of the two and then they’re like, Oh, well, something’s changed. I’m gonna go off now and just like go to the club every night. And next thing you know, the summer’s over and they are broke, whether they started broke, or they started rich, and they go off the deep end. So you have to make sure you still maintain a decent amount of discipline, but there certainly is a lot of value in making friends interacting with people and trying to enjoy yourself

 

Brad Wilson  48:16  

going out living living a fun life. I mean, you know, sometimes you can go out and get drunk and pass out and it’s just going to be okay, as long as you don’t do it every single night, right?

 

Jonathan Little  48:29  

To be fair, there are other ways to go have fun, I want to make it clear, you don’t have to go and be an alcoholic, you’re allowed to go to a sporting event, you’re allowed to go to a concert, you’re allowed to go hiking, go boating, whatever. So I am not advocating copious amounts of alcohol. Now, this is just our experience with hanging out right? I have had copious amounts of alcohol but I’m not advocating that I do my best to not not go off on that so much. Because then I don’t sleep and my belly hurts and my brain hurts and I don’t need that in my life right now. I’m too old for that. Yeah, if you drink enough alcohol, you eventually realize you don’t need to drink the alcohol or you don’t want to drink the alcohol. So there’s a lot of value in that. But that said, like if I could tell my kids a few things to not do I would tell them to never drink alcohol. And I would tell them to never be degenerate gamblers because even if those things did not wreck me they perhaps could have and I’ve seen them wreck plenty of people to the point that I’d rather tell my kids to not get on that then to play around with it even if it does perhaps provide some joy.

 

Brad Wilson  49:26  

Yeah, alcohol for me is never resonated I if I if I want to reality distorting substance, I think edibles for me are is the way to go. Because they helped me sleep naturally. They helped me sleep at night, first of all, and second of all, I’m not like hungover. My sleep is not horrendous and I wake up and I’m ready to go the next day. So like yeah, I alcohol. I have a problem, right? Like, I can’t drink. I can’t take one shot of something. Because if like one shot is good, then like 12 shots is better. And I wake up the next day, I shoot you not like when I was 21 drink so much like I’m on the couch for like, three solid days straight just cannot function or do anything. And yeah, I think I have a weak constitution anyways relates to like hangovers and stuff like that. So I just can’t I can’t do it.

 

Jonathan Little  50:20  

Yeah, I mean, you got drinking is a tough thing because there’s lots of social pressure. That said, you can just surround yourself by people with people who don’t necessarily go out to drink. That’s just the thing they do not do something is is that in the American culture and a lot of European culture, etc. That’s just what people do. I found that I can have exactly one drink. If I go for one drink, there may be a problem. But if I can usually set the the rule of you will have one today. Like there’s a poker tournament. Next thing I know, and most of them have one, usually zero. There’s poker tournament in a week, you can probably do whatever you want overtime and just enter. There’s nothing going on for another week. You probably do whatever you want. But I’m a pretty pretty hard rule most of the time to have one because I know if I go over one, it’ll eat 10 And then we end up in the gutter.

 

Brad Wilson  51:07  

For some reason, if Mike and Jesse around I don’t believe you that you can only drink one if they’re if they’re pushing it because they are bad influences. Yeah, they’re really good at pushing stuff. And yeah, they’re, but they’re really just amazing, amazing human beings.

 

Jonathan Little  51:23  

For COVID happened actually February last year, maybe Miko was part of that was probably just starting, we went to New Orleans for a bachelor party, and just like an insane party every day, and I was pretty convinced after I got back once people started coming. Oh my god, I must have had COVID I felt like definitely I came home. But no, I just drank a lot.

 

Brad Wilson  51:42  

Yeah, it was self induced party for

 

Jonathan Little  51:44  

four days straight. It was like a week. It was a week. It was a week in New Orleans. And that’s probably a little bit too long for a bachelor party in New Orleans.

 

Brad Wilson  51:51  

It’s unsurprising that Mike and Jesse were were involved in that whole ordeal. Do you have if you could pin down a session of yours is particularly memorable, or your favorite poker session ever say anything springs to mind?

 

Jonathan Little  52:07  

No, I remember some bad ones. I don’t remember the good ones.

 

Brad Wilson  52:11  

Okay, let’s talk about the bad ones.

 

Jonathan Little  52:12  

I remember one bad one. First thing that came to mind when you said this was the World Series I was having a bad World Series of over summer I was did not do well. In the terminus. I’ve had two summers at the World Series was zero caches despite playing a lot. We talked to basically every good pro, they’ll tell you they probably had one out of 15 Give or take where you just get completely crapped on all summer. I’ve had two of them. I’ve also had good ones. But you know, this was one of the bad ones. And at the end of the summer, I think I had like, I must have had like, exactly 40k left on me or something like that. So I bought into a I think it was 100 200 game. And we’re playing whatever after a while I raised with pocket knives under the gun, a very, very, very recreational, bad player. Minimum reraise. So I go like 1200 He goes 2200 or something like that. Fine. I call you have the aces or maybe the Kings, right? Five comes jack nine, three, we get the whole 40k in there each. And actually there was like 60k in there each because I was up a little bit. And the board rounds out Queen 10. So Jack, nine, three, Queen 10 Ace King gets their kings gets their queens gets there. I table my hand because whatever he called me. He says Nice hand you got it. And then he goes to like his cars. And then the guy next to

 

Brad Wilson  53:28  

him says, oh, no, you won. No, no, no, no.

 

Jonathan Little  53:30  

He’s looking at me like no, I don’t, he’s going to mock it. And as he was going to mock, the guy rips the cards out of his fingers. And to hit tables, the cards for him. He has the pocket kings of course. And that was pretty tilting to me. That was like my last 40k I had on me or whatever it was. And that is how I lost to be fair, I lost it. I’m not mad, I lost the hand. I guess I get mad. I’m mad that the guy said something that said if you think about it, that’s definitely the smart thing to do. Because then you sat down with a little and this guy you can’t even read the board gets a hold of 120k stack or whatever it was. So it was clearly the quote unquote, most profitable play. But I was very very frustrated that I got in my car and I like booked the airplane ticket. I didn’t go home I just like got an airplane out of there.

 

Brad Wilson  54:18  

Take me somewhere anywhere but here. Yeah, I don’t want to do here. That’s that’s happened to me before and I almost never get mad at the table or say anything to anyone. And that was an instance where I did get pretty annoyed when like it was I had nines to this is kind of funny who the fault was like jack nine deuce. We get it in and like turn Queen river queen. And it wasn’t 120k it was probably around 10k or 12k. And the dude is like looking at his cards and like slides him towards the MCC. And the guy next to him is just like wait, no, no, you Have the winning hand you have a full house and he like stopped and grabbed his hand and looked at it and turn it over and he had queen jack and I fucking lost my mind. Oh, yes, queen jack,

 

Jonathan Little  55:12  

like on the hands you can like I get my guy missing the four card straight. How’s your guy miss? When he turns the Queen isn’t not a little bit happy.

 

Brad Wilson  55:19  

I have no earthly idea. But like I lost by shit. Like because, man like that’s just a thing that you just you’re you don’t do like the players responsible for reading their own hand like, Oh, God.

 

Jonathan Little  55:33  

Yeah, I don’t exactly remember how it went down. I remember I was enraged. And who knows what I did? I don’t know. You flew?

 

Brad Wilson  55:40  

You flew out to Vegas? I

 

Jonathan Little  55:41  

know I left.

 

Brad Wilson  55:42  

Yeah, I have no memory of it. It just is like burned out of your mind, which is probably for the best. No, I

 

Jonathan Little  55:47  

feel I probably said something very rude and aggressive. And mean, I would not prefer to repeat here today.

 

Brad Wilson  55:53  

I and I think it is very justifiable given the situation that players are responsible for eating their own hands.

 

Jonathan Little  56:01  

It’s tough though. Like, I certainly get the idea. Why did that guy? Why did that guy do that? Because he wanted the fish to have the money. Like obviously, right? Because you want the fish with all the money. So it’s tough, right? Like, do you piss off the pro at the table. I mean, I don’t remember who the guy is. So I don’t even know. It cost him literally nothing. And, you know, for me to have harsh, harsh feelings or whatever in the future. Because I’m gonna who it was. And it let him be at the table with a guy who can’t read his hand with 120k. So clearly, it’s the most profitable thing to do. And if you’re playing a cash game, for a lot of people, their thought process is only what is the most profitable thing for me to do. Whether that’s the right thing or not. Right and the right sort of like an ethics question, right? I mean, ethics are all over the place. So in theory, if the guy wanted to make as much money as possible, it was definitely the right thing to do.

 

Brad Wilson  56:47  

Yeah, I still didn’t enjoy it. No, I can’t imagine you did. And I think that at the end of the day, I’ve got at the end of the day, I have to be able to live with myself and put my head on my pillow and like ethically. And integrity wise, that’s just not a thing. Even if I do not like the person that it’s against, like I have something personal against them. I’m still not going to interfere, because it’s just not my points.

 

Jonathan Little  57:11  

These are just straight up your ethics, though. Yeah, to some extent, right. Like, and you’ve set your own rules. So why is this thing something that you have decided is unethical? This happened before? A lot of people were slow playing right? Like I’ve never slept with anybody in my life? Not slowly, slow roll. I’ve never slow rolled anybody in my life. Yeah, fair, you have the best hand on the river you like make them think they win just to like, force them a bit. That said, there’s nothing there’s a rule saying you can’t slow people. And so some people will actively slow roll their opponents. And some people think they’re like the worst humans in the world. But there’s no rule that says you can’t slow people. I don’t think there’s a rule that you can’t say, Sir, you have the best hand? I don’t think there’s a rule that actually actually says that.

 

Brad Wilson  57:52  

Yeah, I’m not sure. I think it says it says players are responsible for reading their own hands. Right. That’s, that’s the thing.

 

Jonathan Little  58:01  

But somebody else could read if they feel like it that says that says something about you. If I love my own hand, that’s my problem. Doesn’t say this guy reads my hand. That’s my problem. It’s true. But anyway, these are your own rules that you might hear a lot of rules in life that people make up. And to be fair, somebody made up the rules. So it’s this weird thing where like, you can kind of do whatever you want. That said, I found that you should typically try to make people happy, whatever that means. And that usually works out better than trying to maximize your equity in terms of dollars and every spot. Yeah,

 

Brad Wilson  58:35  

I mean, really, if you want to go super philosophical, we like morality is just a set of rules that you believe and integrity is you follow your own moral code. And from person to person, moral codes can be different. So integrity can be very different as well. So there is a bit of subjectivity in that.

 

Jonathan Little  58:55  

And like you said, that you won’t be able to live with yourself, if you did what the person did to me, and you were they caught up the other players, or whatever. But at the same time, maybe that guy could not live with himself if he let the pro win that money unjustifiably, because bro didn’t have the best hand, I did not have the best. And I was right. I had the worst hand on the river. You had the worst hand, I’ll remember you’re supposed to lose. So maybe that guy couldn’t have slept with himself or lived with himself if he did not do that.

 

Brad Wilson  59:20  

Yeah. I mean, it’s funny thinking about it, but you could be absolutely right. And I guess like, at the end of the day, like I said, it’s just doing the thing that resonates with you. And then at the end of the day, that’s all you can do. And that’s all you really have control over.

 

Jonathan Little  59:35  

Yeah, one thing teaching people to play poker has helped me with is just learning to be like empathetic to some extent being able to put myself in somebody else’s shoes and ask why are they doing this? Is there some logical reason is the reason reasonable, right? Like, I’m sure that I despise that person who took that 120k for me back in the day, but like now I get it, you know, like I would not have done it, but I get it. It’s reasonable. And I don’t really have that many hard feelings. I’m not unhappy. I’m not so unhappy about it, right? Yeah, as we

 

Brad Wilson  1:00:04  

get older, I think we get less, we probably get less judgy about questionable behavior or even things. We get less judgy about even labeling something as questionable behavior, right? We kind of dive dive deep in it. There are some things that happened like in the poker space that I think lots of people will just adamantly disagree with that I’m like, it’s it’s not good. But it’s a thing. You know, like the whole jungle man thing is like that the ghosting situation was like, yeah, it’s, it’s not good. But like, whatever. It’s not like on my top 100, horrible things that people have done to get up in arms about it, I guess.

 

Jonathan Little  1:00:40  

Yeah, the poker space is kind of a weird one. Because some things feel very dirty like my puzzle. Whereas other things feel less dirty. Like, you know, ghosting someone that said, if you do something that is against the rules of your site, you are live to get punished. And you shouldn’t get punished if you’re breaking the rules, right? I’ve broken rules on some sites, I’ve been punished. ACR banned me a while back, because I talk shit about him. And they didn’t like that. And I apparently that’s against the rules, they can ban you for any reason whatsoever. And if they think they’re making fun of their avatars, and saying that their site goes down a lot, is justifiable reason to be banned. They can ban me. So they banned me, right?

 

Brad Wilson  1:01:23  

Oh, you made jokes too. Don’t Don’t forget the jokes that you made about I made jokes. They’re they’re pros. You losing all the hands that you play against their pros? No, just most

 

Jonathan Little  1:01:30  

of them just because they’re pros are great poker players, you know. So I, you know, you make jokes, whatever, anyway, but you get what I’m saying. Right?

 

Brad Wilson  1:01:38  

I of course, is

 

Jonathan Little  1:01:38  

it conditions of the site, as does everyone else who plays there, but I broke the rules, you’re not allowed to do anything that they think is out of line, therefore they can ban you. If you go somebody on a site. That’s against the rules on some sites, not all sites on some sites. And yeah,

 

Brad Wilson  1:01:52  

I don’t think that I think this was like a decentralized app. That’s like its own wild, wild west type situation.

 

Jonathan Little  1:02:00  

Yeah, if you plan on a decentralized app, or whatever, if there are no rules about these things, you can do whatever you want, maybe the people you’re playing against won’t like it, you might be banned from the games, which is actually kind of big issue if you played big high stakes games, because people don’t like you. If the few key people don’t like you, you are out. And to be fair, a few key people like you, you’re in, there are some good, some bad, but they’re like hardcore criminals who are playing a lot of these big games on the on the unlicensed unregulated apps right now. And they’re just like, straight up cheating people super using. And that’s just what to open yourself up to, right. And you got to be careful whenever you get out of line. And I think initially a lot of people don’t necessarily realize is that in poker, doing things that are out of line and something, to some extent, become the norm. Like, where I grew up, it was bad to gamble, right? It was thought to be a bad thing yet I gamble every day. So um, but I don’t feel bad about going to play poker, or, you know, if I go and play a hand of blackjack, or maybe then I make a sport, but I don’t feel bad about it. You know what I mean? Like, I don’t feel like I’m going to hell or something. But when people feel that way, eventually if you let’s say, goes on somebody’s account every day, that just becomes normal. That’s just how you play cards. Right? So overworld is definitely a weird one. And I have learned to try to not get out of line and offend the people who make the rules. Because if you offend the people who make the rules, they are alive to attempt to punish you.

 

Brad Wilson  1:03:24  

Yeah, it’s basically Long story short, we need regulation and to like, like we said earlier, earlier in the interview, just to kind of tying this together, were coming up, we didn’t really have mentors. And so a lot of like, the rules of online poker have been created by 20 something year old humans who are just figuring things out, like as they go along. And so you can see that like these gray areas, and these like integrity issues, there’s just, yeah, lots of room for conflict, especially when we online poker for the most part is unregulated in the United States. And so, yeah,

 

Jonathan Little  1:04:02  

I mean, I would recommend everyone treat everyone like you would like to be treated. Ideally, you’d like to be treated reasonably, you would prefer to probably know who you’re playing against than not you prefer that. You’re not getting stoned, cheated on the games. And so you know, like, treat other people like you’d be treated and don’t approach life from the point of view of I want to make as much money as possible. I do not care who I

 

Brad Wilson  1:04:24  

cheat. That’s very New Testament of you. Yes. Don’t

 

Jonathan Little  1:04:27  

Don’t be a cheater is what it amounts to. Don’t be too don’t be a cheater, like beat people. But don’t cheat people. Like that’s that people don’t cheat people. That’s that’s, that’s my motto over here.

 

Brad Wilson  1:04:38  

There you go. What do you think so weakness that you’ve had related to your poker game? And then we’ll just say like historically historical weakness and what steps did you take to overcome said weakness?

 

Jonathan Little  1:04:50  

Of his weakness? I still have it. I mean, look at to some extent, I am not the best poker player right? There are a lot of spots that I study after the fact and realize I have screwed Not, right like, for a long time, I was way too weak and tight from the big line where I would either fold too often from the big blind or I would call too often then check fold too often, right? And I think I’ve gotten substantially better at this. But even then there’s still a lot of spots that I miss. I mean, I’ve done a lot of solver work for the content at poker coaching.com. And there’s a lot of spots where you’re supposed to have like 10%, Stone garbage, checkers bluffs out of position. And how do you pick those 10%? Garbage hands, right? Because you may have, let’s say, half your angels check folding. But you know, 10% of your range is hands that are like cut pretty logical check holes, but you’re supposed to raise with them. So how do you pick those 10%? Do you actually make the play with that 10% in high pressure spots. So I think that’s something a lot of people struggle with people tend to do even worse from out of position than they should, in most scenarios. And that’s something that’s a spot that I’m always working on. And you know, as you study various stack depths, you learn more and more like, as you get shallower and shallower, you should be leading with a wider and wider range compared to when you’re deep stack from a GTO point of view. And figuring out those kinds of spots is very, very valuable. And you know, doing more and more work, what it amounts to is looking at all of the spots, trying to note the differences between other spots, right, like 20, big blinds from the big blind is very different than 10 big blinds from the big blind. And you learn the things that you should be doing to adjust and when you should be making those adjustments. But poker is a big game, it’s a hard game, there’s a bunch of spots, and even though a lot of spots looks similar, they are all kind of different. And guess what else was I’m always trying to learn more of the spots.

 

Brad Wilson  1:06:37  

Yeah, just a recognition that like, there’s more to learn and there’s always more to learn because this game is fucking complex. It’s a hard game. I don’t know if any any of you listening to this know this poker. Poker is a tough game to crack.

 

Jonathan Little  1:06:51  

Yeah, there’s a there’s a neat spot I was looking at the other day or if you’re like 12, big blinds deep or shallow or a 15, big blinds deeper, shallower if, let’s say late, if early position raises and you’re in the big blind, you’re supposed to call still a pretty wide range in Terminus. And on exactly King xx boards, you’re supposed to have a pretty big leading range, which is kind of weird to think why on King x x only, and also low cardboard, but why King X X not Jack x x, right? It’s because you’re defending big wine with like every king x in that scenario, and under the gun is not raising every king X or raising some king x, but not every king x. And so you actually have a whole lot of kings in your range. So in that spot, you get to lead with a lot of stuff for a small size, because you essentially have way more effective not hands near engineer opponent, right. And so like really abnormal spot and not really logical because normally when you’re at a position playing DeepStack there, you don’t want to be getting it all in with like the king to on you know, king, King anything anything really because you’re gonna be dominated when a lot of money goes in the when you’re playing 10 big blinds deep or whatever, you just don’t care. So you can be pretty happy, leaving small with some king x x and then also some total garbage, right like we’re talking about comes king, King seven, three, you can you can lead with random bad drawers and neat neat stuff to see. But if you don’t go through and study all these spots, you’ll ever find it you have to inquire about all the spots.

 

Brad Wilson  1:08:07  

Yeah, it’s it’s funny, like you mentioned position, by the way, which is like you it’s something that like you hear over and over and over again, just like how position is so paramount of importance. And I was going through the data, building fish in a barrel, which is my course on C betting against against fish, recreational players and like, what I realized is like, just naturally, when when the fish is in position, they lose half as much as when they’re out of position. This is just like an organic thing that happens like and so even with players that really don’t understand all the things that are in play, and what’s going on, their loss rate is half as much when they’re in position compared to when they’re out of position. And it just goes to show you that position is probably no matter how many times people say how important it is, it’s probably still under thought about as it relates to just how valuable it is to be in position. For sure.

 

Jonathan Little  1:09:04  

And that’s why you have to perhaps spend even more time working on the common spots where you are going to be at a position. So you want to be looking at spots where you raise early position in the button calls are always cut off and the button calls because if someone’s going to call it’s more likely or most likely going to be the player on the button. Right. And I mean, like a good example is it used to raise a continuation but every time when it came Jack six to when I was under the gun and button called but turns out from a GTO point of view, that’s actually pretty bad. You’re supposed to be doing a decent amount of checking with all sorts of stuff like you’re always using a really big strategy with every hand when you are out of position and the button calls you. So the question is then, do you still just bet every time because people over fold or do you try to play closer to GTO right? And you know, one strategy is going to be definitively better than the other one. And it’s up to you to figure that out. Joe? Yeah, being out of position was tough. I would recommend everyone play pretty tight from out of position pretty loose from him. position, but you should be defending the big blinds a lot. And that’s the tough spot because everybody knows at this point in time, or most people know to defend their big blind pretty wide against small raises, but they are then just check folding a lot, like a lot a lot. Like they say it was a check, fold, I don’t know 50% In some spot, they may check gray check, fold 65%. And that’s gonna result in the preflop wide calls is torching money, because they’re gonna way too often, right? So you got to make sure you know how to battle well in the common spots. And that’s my tournament course does, it goes through all the common spots, and position out of position with various stack depths to ensure that you have seen examples of all these scenarios, we talked about how to play your entire range of these pots. Yeah,

 

Brad Wilson  1:10:40  

it’s kind of funny. Like, once the pot odds model comes into play, and you recognize like, oh, I need to be defending like any two suited cards. Well, now all of a sudden, you’re finding yourself post flop with any two suited cards and realizing like, oh, shit, I’ve got a lot more hands that I need to do stuff with. And it’s just very easy to over fold, get out of whack, and just make some pretty clear mistakes. And you know, like you said, some intuition will only take you so far. And there are some things that you have to be doing regularly, that intuitively do not make a ton of sense. But you just have to do it anyway.

 

Jonathan Little  1:11:17  

Yeah, bluffing is a lot of fun. I think you’ll I think most people decide if they get out there and they try it. A lot of people just don’t want to be out of their comfort zone, talking to a lot of very recreational players, like, oh, I don’t want to make that play, because it makes me uncomfortable. But like, in my mind, when I’m playing poker, comfort never really enters my mind. Like this is either the most profitable play or it’s not. And anytime you make the play, that’s not the most profitable play, you’re giving money to the other people, not you, you’re taking the money that you worked really hard for and giving it away. So do I want to give away all my money? The answer is obviously, no. Maybe by the time I die, I will give it all the way but I don’t want to give it all away now. Right? So this is the spot where you just have to ask like, am I trying to win at this game? Or am I not and not am I going to feel comfortable with my decision. Also, a lot of people who are recreational just want to play poker, they want to be sitting at the table. And if they happen to lose all the money, they bring in a cash game, or if they happen to get stacked on the tournament, they have to go home, they have to leave the table, right. And that is devastating to them, especially if they only get to play once every week or once every month or whatever. You got to get all that out of your mind if your goal is to actually want as much money as possible from poker, even anywhere near as much money as possible from poker. I’ve been reviewing some hands on my YouTube channel from the $10,000 Buy in tournament that Gigi runs every week, they have a $10,000 tournament gets a good guarantee. And there’s it’s always really stacked Final Table. And every week, whenever I’m reviewing the people who are like making these deep runs, if let’s say 15% of the field normally caches their cash rates like 13% or maybe like 16%, right, like not a big cash rate by any means. A lot of people think the goal is to cash and get into money in tournaments. But you look at all the biggest winners between like 13 and 18% cash rate, which is roughly normal, right? Except for these players, when they make the bronze they have all the chips and they win the tournament. And that kind of thing is beneficial. There’s a good online player Lina. Nicholas. Nicholas, last name starts with a It’s not coming to me right now. Anyway, super Crusher has infinite winnings. 13% cash rate, no problem, like a million dollars in cash is only on GG, which is just like ridiculous.

 

Brad Wilson  1:13:29  

Yeah, that’s, that’s pretty crazy. And you know, poker, if you’re trying to play poker, because you want to always feel comfortable, you’ve got another thing coming, because you will never play a cash game, you will never play a tournament where you just get it in with top set and aces every time and win every pot and there’s no marginal type situation, right? Like, poker is just, it’s a minefield of marginal spots, and just trying to figure things out and feeling uncomfortable. And like you just gotta get used to it, you have to get over that. I don’t want to feel I don’t want to get involved in a marginal spot. I don’t want to feel uncomfortable. That’s what the game is. This is the game that you are playing. So you just got to you know, just got to put on your your big boy or big girl pants and except that sometimes not everything is cut and dry. And you just got to do the best you can.

 

Jonathan Little  1:14:21  

Yeah, I think a lot of people come from playing small stakes cash games, were being kind of tight and straightforward isn’t all that bad if your opponents are just literally giving it away, right? But as you move up to even one three or two, five or something like that live, and cash games or any tournament higher than like $50, buy in tournaments live, you got to get in there, you got to mix it up a little bit because your opponents are not going to be so terrible to the point that you’re given the interview right now, your opponent’s not going to be so terrible to the point that they are just going to let you like get paid off maximally every single time. Right? Right. I mean I’m gonna of course do some things that will cultivate an image despite being title will result in you getting paid off little bit more often. A good example, this would be someone like Scotty Wynn, who’s always chatting and wearing flashy clothes and taking his time, such as like, Oh, I’m thinking about playing, but I’m just going to fold again. And that makes people think he’s in the action to some extent. But I would rather not do any of that stuff. And instead just play good fundamentally sound poker, get in there battle and make make good plays is what it amounts to.

 

Brad Wilson  1:15:29  

Yeah, and the game gets more nuanced, especially as you move up stakes, right? Like we had a discussion with some some lower level players on this hand, were basically the board was something like four or 578. And they had sixes, and they opted to take a check call line on the turn. And like just chaos ensued where somebody was like, Why would you call with a straight they’re like, the river paired the board and completed the flush. And they’re like, you just let the you just let the board pair and the flush guy completed. Why would you call this like, because you need to call with some straights so that your age is protected. So you can call riverbeds if you always raise with your straights, well, then that means when you call the turn, you don’t have straights, and you just get bluffed on tons of rivers. And that’s like a, that’s a jump in level of play from like the super low stakes games where like, nobody knows, nobody cares. Nobody’s paying attention. So you can just always raise their with your straights. But as soon as people pay attention, soon as people recognize like your range is kept in these spots, the best players are going to put the screws to you. And it’s going to be tough sledding, moving forward. Yeah,

 

Jonathan Little  1:16:35  

I mean, if I’m playing against someone who I think is a recreational ish player, and I bet the turn on a fourth straight turn, and they think for a while and just like kind of reluctantly call and the rivers are blank, and I have nothing, you can be very sure I’m gonna be blasting it. Because that seems like a very free pot against people who raise all of their good hands in that scenario, right. You always want to make sure that whenever you bet your angels not all good hands or all bad hands. And you also want to make sure that whenever you check slash call your angels not all really getting into a really bad and you want to mix it up. Something else to do my tournament course was go through the solver and basically show how the solver breaks down your range and in every spot and always has some nuts, whether it’s checking whether it’s betting whatever it’s always doing, its best to mix in a little bit of nuts here and there. And nuts are actually really good hands to just check with even when you’re out of position on river because that lets you check race sometimes that lets you get a few more bluffs and and that makes it hard to play against if you’re easy to play against. Well, you’re not hard to play against, right? Like it’s your bonuses are going to take all of your money very quickly. But yeah, a lot of people just want to be able to sit there and not pedal and that’s fine against the absolute most maniacal, absurd players are calling stations that are extreme calling stations. But most people today in poker have gotten at least somewhat decent, they realize that you haven’t played a hand in an hour and you decide to put all your money in, you probably have something and they’re not going to pay off like you would like them to.

 

Brad Wilson  1:17:52  

And you always everything sets up everything else, which is something that like, I think that beginning level poker players don’t realize is like, if you want to have strong hands to induce bluffs with the river, then you have to call the turn with some strong hands. Like, you know, if you want to call down versus an over bluff line with some stronger hands, well, then you don’t get to check raise those all the time on the flop, because you need some on the turn, then you need some on the river as well. So it’s like basically every decision affects everything else. And yeah, it takes some time to sort of gain clarity of what’s going on and how how you just you become super exploitable, if like your check, raising all of your nuts on the turn, always. And you’re playing against a good player who’s just going to bluff you out of your shoes on the river when you don’t raise the turn.

 

Jonathan Little  1:18:42  

Yeah, as your opponents are more aggressive. Especially whenever you take a passive line, as many people will be in the medium stakes. That’s just kind like a tendency a lot of them have is you show weakness. They’re betting, right? If that’s the type of player again, sorts are just good, strong world class players, I would venture to say you should be even more inclined to do more checking with your best hands out of position to give them every opportunity to take all of the hands that could potentially bluff and bluff all of them instead of you know if you bet they’re just gonna fold. All right. Absolutely. Yeah,

 

Brad Wilson  1:19:12  

I frame it to my students in a way of like, let’s imagine that you see a flop and two beds go in, like say, two beds go in post flop. And now we’re gonna talk about how those beds go in. And like how those beds go in some ways are more valuable than other ways. And so like betting the flop villain calling, checking back turn and calling a river bet is more valuable than betting the flop, betting the turn and then checking back the river. Because when you check back the turn villain has bluffs in their range, right? So that riverbed is more valuable, because villains don’t just always have something that they’re having to call with. So even stuff like that is worthy of consideration that like two beds go in the pot postflop those beds can have different values based on how the beds go in the middle. So like how do you want those beds to go in the middle and then kind of Trying to manufacture scenarios like that.

 

Jonathan Little  1:20:03  

For sure, for sure.

 

Brad Wilson  1:20:05  

Let’s do lightning round here and then I’m going to I’m getting a massage and I don’t have a car so I’m going to run to the actually, it’ll be a nice walk in the sunshine to like half a mile away. All right. Hey, man, this is my first one in like a month I’m I’ve got my shots for COVID I’ve done like I told you 11 podcast this week. I fucking deserve my massage. What’s the purchase you’ve made in the last year that’s been impactful to your poker game doesn’t necessarily have to be like poker training could be you know, I’ve seen you chugging on some brain fuel stuff something could be as you know standing desk just something that’s improved your life.

 

Jonathan Little  1:20:49  

So I was gonna mention Brain Fuel I suppose we will still mentioned Brain Fuel Brain Fuel is a company I’m involved with at this point I started off as a customer and I told him I liked it. And you know, it’s a it’s a beverage that essentially tries to give long lasting energy throughout the day, not in a like five hour energy or type thing where you’re just like super jittery and pumped up, but more of a slowly releases apparently, whatever you drink natural caffeine. If it is mixed with healthy fats, it slowly goes into your bloodstream also has lots and with which like it makes it lasts all day. So I used to drink something like six cups of coffee every single day, which is probably not ideal. And now I wake up, I have one cup of coffee, but an hour later I’ll have a brain fuel, and I’m good for the rest of the day. So that’s quite nice. I don’t want to be having to go make cups of coffee every every two hours or whatever it is in order to just be halfway awake. So people can check that out at b r e i n f UEL can use promo code poker coaching to get 15% off. And I like it. I like it. They work with a lot of other poker players. A lot of other people in the mind sport area like video gamers, MMA fighters, doctors, the guy who made it is a doctor and he had would do long surgeries. And he would realize after six hours of operating on someone, you start to get a little bit tired and jittery. So he designed his own thing that that worked. And he started letting other doctors use it, they liked it too. And now it’s brain fuel. So that has been very beneficial. And I don’t think I’ve actually bought anything in terms of like my poker setup in a long time, but I would recommend everyone get a good poker setup, right? Like if you’re an online poker player, get a pretty good computer, right? Like, you just gotta pay Hate to break it. To be fair, you don’t even need like a supercomputer to run poker programs and hold a manager or anything like that you can get yourself a pretty regular computer. But if you’re gonna be making content, get a good computer that can handle the content. If you’re going to be sitting in a desk all day, get a standing desk, I’m going to standing desks, right? So get wherever you need to allow yourself to function. Well, I’m trying to look my mouse where to put my mouse. I’m not to show off my mouse. I don’t even know where I put the thing. Oh, here it is. Can you all somebody we’re listening here. I have this mouse. Logitech in five, seven zeros beat up, be super beat up anyway. Logitech M 570. Mouse. It’s a trackball, mouse. Yeah, oh, you have one. There you go. It’s really good. And I used to have terrible carpal tunnel, that’s something that may save a lot of the online players I now I have no problems with this. And I lose a mouse every once a while it was behind my cup. But it’s really, really good. I like that a lot. And that’s something I would recommend everyone look into if you ever have any issues with your wrist or can play a ton of online tournaments. And I want to be going like this all day with your arm. Like my arm doesn’t move and just like move your thumb and you’re good to go.

 

Brad Wilson  1:23:29  

Yeah, it’s pretty hilarious. We have the same, we have the same mouse. And I will say that. I don’t know how you lose your mouse because you barely even move it. It just sits in the same place.

 

Jonathan Little  1:23:40  

I have my cup of water right in front of it. Perfectly behind it, I could not see it. My kids randomly will take the mouse that they love coming in here and pressing the microphone and playing with the mouse and playing on my phone. And I believe in the mornings typically I’ll wake up I’ll have my brain go, I’ll go take a shower. I’ll come back when I come back. Just like this whole bookshelf was just a mess. Because the kids have come in and mess up everything. But that’s okay. I don’t mind. It’s fun.

 

Brad Wilson  1:24:06  

Yeah, it’s tornado. That’s, they’ll eventually get older and less interested in your books in mice. And

 

Jonathan Little  1:24:13  

we like the Pope, the poker bracelet. So the randomly take a web T bracelet you’ll find in the living room on the floor.

 

Brad Wilson  1:24:17  

So those are nice.

 

Jonathan Little  1:24:19  

Those are here’s one right here. Again, if you’re listening sorry, you can’t see it. But they’ll just go in here. They’ll pick these things up. We’ll go Daddy, daddy, and then they’ll run off and then I’ll have to go find it.

 

Brad Wilson  1:24:30  

Yeah, just wait till one of them goes missing. I guess that’s gets gets thrown in like an air duct or something.

 

Jonathan Little  1:24:37  

That’s something I have a problem with my wife. Anytime something’s missing, I’ll say oh, don’t worry. It’ll turn out and she’s like, but but maybe it won’t. And actually a baby doll like legitimate baby dolls like you know, the size of your arm right like a real baby doll. We lost that baby doll that doodles gone. I don’t know where it went. They never take it outside. It’s not in the house. I don’t know where the baby doll is. So they have they have definitely lost a baby doll but I always say A if anything’s missing, don’t worry, it’ll turn up because it does turn up, we clean our house, our house is not a mess. And everything turns up eventually. I say this not sweat the small stuff, right?

Brad Wilson:  Yeah, me neither. The kids have iPads and their iPads have gone missing. And we don’t have like a giant house. There’s not many places for them to go. I don’t know where they’re at. But they’ve been missing for like two months. I just assumed that one day, they’ll be in some ridiculous place. I’ll stumble across them. And then we’ll have them right. Like, I’m like, you have that way of, just don’t sweat it. Things typically work out like we just got vaccinated, right? We got our second dose, and my wife was freaking out about scheduling an appointment. And there wasn’t any availability. We were supposed to do it on like a Wednesday, and we never got the email reminder. And I’m like, Babe, just don’t worry about it. We got cards that say to come back on this day. Let’s just show up. And it’ll just work out. And we showed up and they just let us through. And it worked out. And yeah, I think sometimes, a lot of times that works. Sometimes it doesn’t. My wife will remind me on the times and I’m like, it’ll just work out and then it doesn’t she she has actually make it work out. But yeah, I’m just whatever made up, go with it. Things fix themselves eventually.

Jonathan Little:  I think a lot of good relationships are one where one person has the idol workout mentality. The other one has the better make sure everything works out mentality. And they kind of chill each other out, you know? And are they you know, find a happy medium, and then everybody’s happy. Maybe you’re always Oh, things just work out? Well, sometimes nothing works out.

Brad Wilson:  Maybe it’s good better for us. Because maybe they they ensure that things work out. So we’re always validated.

Jonathan Little:  Yeah, and that’s sort of a saying, I have my wife like, everything works out for us. She’s like, Yeah, cuz I make it. Like, so anyway. Yeah, you gotta you gotta find what works for you.

Brad Wilson:  Absolutely. All right, man. Do you have any any book related things you’ve tried? That hasn’t that haven’t worked for you?

Jonathan Little:  A lot of stuff. All sorts of exploitative ways, right? I mean, I’m always trying new things, trying different things. There’s lots of training sites out there, a lot of them have videos on straight up exploits against the player pool. And sometimes I think they work sometimes I think they don’t work. And that’s, that’s important to know. I mean, a good exploit against most people is the triple barrel a lot. They check, you bet, they check, you bet, they check, you bet. And against a lot of people, you’re gonna print money, but again, some people, you’re just going to torch your money. So you need to make sure you’re finding the player pools that tends to work out decently well, in and also you want to make, make sure you’re taking good notes on who doesn’t fold because some people know that it really easy exploits the triple barrel, right? So against those players, you you bet a lot. I mean, a good example of this spot is that they fold me in the small blind in small and medium stakes games online, I’m just going to raise preflop and triple barrel every time blind versus blind when they fold to me playing kind of DeepStack. Because I know people over fold a little bit preflop, a little bit on the flop a whole lot on the turn and a whole lot on the river. So you can shuffle it off, right? That said, when you move to the higher stakes games, that does not work quite as well, you have to revert to a more GTO type strategy where you have some limps and you have some raises. So you don’t have good data to show that the race triple barrel strategy is more profitable than the GTO strategy of small medium stakes. So I do it right. But that’s because I have loads and loads of data. It’s nice when you have data, you’re not just like guessing or relying on somebody else to say what works for them. So yeah, I like triple barrel and triple barrel is good today in the small medium stakes games. There you go.

 

Brad Wilson:  There you go. And always bear in mind that with any exploits, when you are executing an exploit, it is naturally exploitable to you as well, if they take the right and appropriate strategy, you have the right and appropriate defense for the exploit. I think that the reason why the triple barrels work just as an aside is just because what we were talking about earlier how beginner players typically raise their strong hands on an earlier street, they don’t realize that because they raised all their good hands on earlier streets, that leaves them with not a ton of good hands on the river. And when you’re facing a triple barrel, that riverbed is quite big. And when you have a hand like top pair weak kicker, it feels bad to call down with it. However, they don’t realize that that is the best hand that they have there and they have to call down. So that’s like my data also reflects the same thing in cash games like in those like bet bet bet lines. Reverse just get over folded turns get over folded and flops or flops or like defended kind of okay.

Jonathan Little:  Yeah. So I mean, something that didn’t work out and going back to your question. I was for a long time I was doing a limp everything in the small blind strategy in tournaments but I want to do that in cash games because we were making it up. But in tournaments you I have also good data on this for myself from personally where I know that I was making more limping 100% than playing GTO strategy. Again, in all games, and that’s pretty powerful too. But I have I also know that I make more money by raising right. So I played months limping 100% for small blind, and I made money, it looked good. But the alternative would have one more, right? So some people look at them and say, oh, man, you squandered three months of time by doing this strategy. But you get that, right, you learn, and you eventually figure out what’s what, like which play is better.

Brad Wilson:  There’s only one way to learn. And it’s funny, because I’ve also employed over the years, like a heavy limping strategy from the small blind versus the big blind. And, yeah, it’s just, it’s always fun for me to at least engage my curiosity and get some information and feedback that maybe maybe there’s a different way to do something that outperforms what’s conventional in the space, and just giving yourself the ability to kind of pursue that, in me is, for me, that’s one of the reasons why I love poker so much.

Jonathan Little:  Yeah, one thing I would definitely recommend for a lot of people, though, is to not necessarily take your particular experience and assume that that is accurate, because your experience in a lot of spots is going to be a somewhat small sample, especially if you’re not a professional playing a ton of hands, right. Which is why you can kind of outsource that to training sites and watch like my content, right? I have loads of data to backup, all the exploits I discussed, that you probably do not have. And it’s not just my dad, it’s data from a lot of other people that I’ve accumulated, right. And so like when I’m looking at, so I’m looking at like 10 million hands, not just my 100,000 hands. And it turns out, if you get 10 million hands, and you see that you have people doing various things, and one play just makes more money than the other pretty clearly, then then that’s going to be quite good. I mean, another spot that that you’ll just print is if under the gun raises and they get a bunch of collars, you shouldn’t be three betting hands like big Broadway, offsuit, hands like King Jack, king, queen, et cetera, from the small blind, big blind. Calling is profitable. But squeezing is very often more profitable in those spots. Because you’ve locked the initial razors range, the collars often blocked the initial razors premium range as well. So the range is gonna be a little bit weaker than normal under the gun. When you squeeze, you’re gonna squeeze like a little bit less than the size of the box. So pretty big. Those three big blinds are two big one is called call call. I can make it like 12 or something, right? Yeah, no one’s gonna call you or they’re gonna rip it all in if they rip it all out, and who cares, you have the king jack off so you fold. So that’s another spot where I like a lot of data that says that you’re going to win a little bit by calling but your win a ton by erasing and that spot where you never like I Jonathan will never would have found that play. Because he will get all the details offers a very often just they call on the spots. But strong exploiting small musics games that people are not people open a little bit too wide. And they overflowed a little bit too much to the big blind through that, especially because they expect the big blind to call everything.

Brad Wilson:  Yep. And data just kind of gives you clairvoyance on things that like you don’t see through experience or you don’t even learn through experience where it’s like, oh, in order for me to know this, I would have to like call down 10,000 times in a row. And just to build up the database of calling down and just spin like so. Data is just to me is like the end all be all of all these things. And MCS and paired with great theory is just very, very, very powerful. So let’s we’ll we’ll wrap up this round three with Jay L. Of course, I’ll have you back on in the very near future. And we’ll close by asking you or asking you where can the chasing poker Raiders audience find you on the World Wide Web if they don’t know which I don’t know how they wouldn’t know at this point. But we’ll do it anyway.

Jonathan Little:  Probably the people who are new here who do not know me, I they can check me out on YouTube at youtube.com/poker coaching. We have lots and lots of videos there. I think I make something like five videos on YouTube per week. I also have a Twitter at Jonathan Littell and I have a training site poker coaching.com People can go to poker coaching.com/free to get a free Yep, they can also go to poker coaching.com/fundamentals to get a Fundamentals course for free. So lots of stuff there available. Last last resource. Check it out. Over coaching.com Yep, so watch Brad videos.

Brad Wilson:  Yeah, we have some Coach Brad, webinars and more to come every single month. So poker coaching.com Thanks for your time and energy man. I always appreciate it always a good time.

Jonathan Little:  Thanks for having me.

 

We’re a fish dog bits the flop. And you don’t know what to do. One man Coach Brad Wilson, because his surefire plan to neutralize flop leads to shreds. Available now go to chasingpokergreatness.com