Little By Jonathan Little: Growing The Game at the PokerStars NJ Festival

By all accounts, Jonathan Little is one of the most successful live tournament players in the history of the game. He’s got $6,388,782 in live tournament earnings, built largely before high roller events really skewed earnings numbers in poker, and two World Poker Tour titles that helped him earn WPT Season VI Player of the Year honors.

Of course, he still plays regularly in high stakes tournaments around the globe, but these days, a lot of his time is spent making an effort to grow the game and help those who want to get a whole lot better at it.

Little does this through a number of different avenues, including writing a number of bestselling poker books like his well-received Jonathan Little’s Excelling at No-Limit Hold’em series, Strategies for Beating Small Stakes Poker Tournaments, and Jonathan Little on Live No-Limit Cash Games. He also blogs regularly on his own JonathanLittlePoker.com site, coaches players through poker training websites including PokerCoaching and FloatTheTurn, streams his play on Twitch, and even pens regular strategy articles right here on PokerNews.

Monday, on the second day of the PokerStars Festival New Jersey, those efforts went live on Twitch again, as Little joined PokerStars’ own Lee Jones for the first of a series of Q&A sessions at the festival to be held throughout the week and streamed live on the PokerStars Twitch channel.

PokerNews joined the stream to get a little insight into how Little thinks things like Twitch streams and Q&A sessions can help grow poker, and if he thinks it’s the responsibility of players who have had such great success in the game to give back in that way.

“I’ve always felt the desire to want to help people who want to learn, because I know when I started a long time ago, there were people who helped me,” Little said. “I found people who were better than me at the games I wanted to learn. Some of them did not help, but some of them did help, and I’m happy to help anyone who is like-minded. Anyone who wants to learn how to get good at something.”

Lee Jones and Jonathan Little

Over the years, Little said he’s helped a lot of people become better poker players, and he’s particularly proud of that.

“I’ve had numerous students who have gone from, especially living in not-so-well-off places, to doing pretty well because they are studying poker and getting good at it, and that’s great,” he said. “I don’t think that anyone necessarily has a responsibility to do this thing, but if you want poker to survive, and if you want poker to thrive, there is a responsibility to make poker enjoyable for everyone that plays it, to the best of your ability.

“You’ll see some people who try to make the experience of playing poker miserable for all their opponents, and that’s the exact opposite of what you want to be doing. You want people to go play poker, have a good time, and want to go play again. You don’t want people to play, have a bad time …

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