The PokerStake player was down to one big blind on Day 1b of the opening event of the PokerGO Cup but bounced off the canvas to make the money. The competition has been intense in the opening stages of the infamous PokerGO Tour tournament festival, where Jonathan so famously won the entire series back in 2024. Two years on, the formidable poker professional, author and coach is proving himself just as hard to beat.

The Bazillion to One Shot

The PokerGO Cup is always a popular series for players to attend but the 2026 version has been phenomenally so. A massive 215 entries into the $3,000 buy-in event saw a bumper prizepool of $1,195,000 up for grabs. To make Day 2 and the money, players would have to battle against each other at the purple felt for a long Day 1 and Day 1b was an epic.

The key hand for many took place late in the day, as Jonathan Little and Sandeep Koralla got all the chips in the middle pre-flop. Little, who is one of PokerStake’s most reputable players, was hoping to knock out his opponent Koralla, who started the hand with fewer chips than his fellow American.

Jonathan’s ace-king of hearts needed to hit against Koralla’s pocket jacks, and the flop was a good one for the PokerStake player, coming . A on the turn was safe as houses for Jonathan, but a heartbreaking river of the meant a massive double-up for Koralla and disaster for Jonathan, as he plummeted to just a single big blind.

In the next hand, Jonathan was forced all-in from the big blind but incredibly got a walk from the table, something that was called a “bazillion to one shot” by Matthew Wantman.

Little Survives, Koralla Thrives

Given that horrific run-out to the coinflip he hoped would propel him into the lead, Jonathan was a heavy favorite to fail to make the money. Somehow, he survived the day and the money bubble too. At the top of the chipcounts, Sandeep Koralla has a substantial lead with 2,125,000 chips, with his nearest challenger being the German professional Manig Loeser, who very much won on the day to end Day 1b with 1.68 million chips.

Jonathan survived to the next day’s play but only with 120,000 so the former PokerGO Cup champion will have a lot of work to do if he is to add yet another major title to his incredible Poker resume. He is far from the only PokerStake player into the next day’s play, with 31 players surviving from the two opening Day 1 flights overall. Chino Rheem sat ninth in the chipcounts at the end of Day 1b with 1.13 million and will be a major threat when playing down to a winner, not least because he recently became one of the most successful winners in PokerGO history and loves the PokerGO Studio at ARIA in Las Vegas.

PokerGO owner Cary Katz remains in contention on 395,000 while David ‘ODB’ Baker cannot be written out of contention. Despite being down to 200,000 chips, David is in the form of his poker career and recently broke down some of the reasons why he adds or subtracts markup from his action on PokerStake in a fascinating insight into poker staking in general.

A Lot More to Come in PokerGO Cup

With a mammoth 10 events in the 2026 PokerGO Cup, backing a PokerStake player for the duration could prove to be a very wise decision. Both Jonathan Little and Cherish Andrews are selling action to a raft of events and as you’ve already discovered how backable Jonathan is, let’s tell you more about his fellow PokerStake player.

In the past five years, Cherish has not only won millions of dollars playing professional poker, but has done so representing female players as the GPI Female Player of the Year on multiple occasions. Now up to $4.22 million in live ranking tournament earnings, Cherish has the potential to run over the poker table in an company and should be backed in any of the four events she’s playing, Events #5, #6, #7 and #10, the final $15,700

‘Main Event’ of the series. Jonathan is selling to Events #2 through #9 with the exception of Event #3.

If you’d like to invest in either or both of the PokerStake talents taking to the felt during the 2026 PokerGO Cup, then you’ll need to register on PokerStake as a buyer then head to our official staking page for the series. With millions of dollars on offer to two very talented players, all you need to do is to pick your champion and sweat the series along with them!