Four years ago, Jamie pokerjamersArmstrong joined the online poker community. Now, he sits at #7 worldwide in the PocketFives.com Rankingson the strength of over $2 million in tracked tournaments. Armstrong is quickly approaching the 10,000-post mark and is fresh off final tabling the Full Tilt Poker$1K Monday and a PokerStarsWorld Championship of Online Poker (WCOOP) High-Roller tournament in September for $75,000 apiece. This week, Armstrong joins us on the PocketFives.com Podcast.

On his #7 slotting in the Rankings, Armstrong admitted, “It feels pretty good. I started from pretty much nothing and slowly moved up. The last year and a half has been a roller coaster ride and there have been plenty of highs and lows. It feels pretty good to be highly ranked.” Armstrong has the eighth best Pro Poll and PLB Scores in the game.

Since the beginning of September, Armstrong has raked in over a half-million dollars in earnings from tournaments that count towards the Rankings and is on a mini-tear as of late. “Running hotter and having more confidence in your game make you make better decisions at all times,” Armstrong asserted. “But I don’t think I’ve made any drastic changes. Since last year, I’ve had to adjust my game because a lot of people didn’t give me credit for hands, so I had to tighten up in a lot of spots.”

A four-page thread in Poker Discussion featured banter about players who had left college to play poker professionally. Armstrong was one such responder, telling the community that he left school with less than one year remaining. He explained on the Podcast, “I’ve been able to grind a lot more and make a lot more money playing. College wasn’t going to benefit me at the time because I had no plans of starting to work or anything of that matter. I wanted to spend all of my time playing poker or backing people and helping people get better at poker.”

Some responders in the forums have asked whether the time is right to leave school or their current profession to play poker for a living. Armstrong, who made that choice in the past, explained what advice he has for those wanting to turn pro: “I would keep with what they’re doing until they feel like they have the confidence and capability to make serious money in poker. It takes a lot of training and experience to get good at the game. Make sure it’s right for you before you make that leap of quitting everything you’ve been working your life for.”

He’s become close with a wealth of members of the online poker community including Nick agriffrodMitchell (pictured) and Taylor taypaur Paur. “I talk to Taylor pretty much every single day when we’re both playing online discussing hands,” Armstrong revealed. “He’s absurd and you can never get a read on him. He’s continuously betting post-flop and it’s difficult to play back at him. A lot of people think agriffrod is on the tighter side, but he’s really aggressive where people don’t expect him to be. It’s difficult to keep up with how he’s thinking.”

Finally, we asked Armstrong to impart advice for newcomers to the game. His wisdom: “Watch videos. It’s difficult with a limited bankroll to subscribe to some of these [training] sites, but a lot of them have videos on how to build bankrolls. There are a lot of small sit and gos and MTTs and I’m sure you can build a bankroll quickly by grinding those because there are a lot of fish in those games.”

Catch the rest of this week’s PocketFives.com Poker Podcastfeaturing Jamie pokerjamers Armstrong.