The Complete Poker Workout by Jonathan Little: The Perfect Gift For a Live Tournament Player!

Why Your Live Tournament Player Will Love This Book

The Introduction section of this book is very nice — it is short and aimed at informing you about how this book is put together, what you need to know, and how to use it. 

Then the simple (but very long) Contents list starts, showing everything you can find in this book in a quite convenient way: number of the quiz plus name of the spot plus effective stack in BB.

Yes, every quiz there is a single spot presented as a continuous story from the preflop to the showdown where Jonathan gives you a hand with infographics, describes it and asks the same question on every street: what should you do? — with four answer options each time.

The structure of this book is surely a source of nostalgia for older players because it is very similar to classic poker books of the 2000s such as ‘Sit’n Go Strategy’ by Colin Moshman from 2007. But it also is a reason to use this work as a pocket book because it is very easy to navigate and practice with.

As this structure implies, when you choose an answer, you have an option to read Jonathan’s version of what you should do with a detailed but short explanation. It is worded so close to his own speech patterns that if you’ve ever watched Little’s training videos on YouTube or social media, you will literally hear him talking to you from pages of this book as I did.

Nuances Readers May Not Like in ‘The Complete Poker Workout’

There are a few specifics of this book which may make the reading process more difficult for some players or even leave them annoyed:

• The target audience for this book is live tournament players who already have enough experience in the game. Too much slang, reg-oriented narrative and lack of beginner-friendly explanations make it just unsuitable for new or inexperienced players.
• The buy-ins for the tournaments used as examples range from $100 to $25,000 (with one random $5 tournament, likely due to a typo), which can be confusing in terms of whether the information on spots applies to cheaper tournaments or not.
• Jonathan uses Big Blinds for titles but all other stacks and bets are only in chips.
• The lowest spots are limited to 15 BB effective stacks — you just do not find in the book any practice for lower effective stacks.
• Infographics have a 2-color deck, so spades and clubs merge with each other — as do hearts and diamonds.

Finally, some phrases can make you uncomfortable due to their wording. For example, in one of the quizzes Little states: “This turn card is not great because you failed to improve your equity” — as if it was up to the player.Overall ‘The Complete Poker Workout’ is a banger — it is easy to read and understand, but also can be useful even for a non-live tournament player as a method of learning and practising the thinking pattern when encountering various spots.