Ten Years Later: The Journey of a Veteran Jungler

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By Ethan Levy

Jonathan “Armao” Armao had suited up to play on the LCS stage many times over the past ten years. In the past, he was fighting to stay in the league, to prove that he belonged in competition with the best junglers in North America. Today, there is no such pressure. His opponent in the jungle, FlyQuest’s Johnson “Gryffin” Le, was nine years old when Armao debuted in the LCS. As the match begins, one jungler is writing an early chapter of his LCS career, the other, the coda.

Armao is no stranger himself to being the young phenom. He first played ranked League of Legends in Season 2, when the two of us duo queued to the respectable rank of Gold III, the modern-day equivalent of mid-Emerald. The next season, he reached high Diamond I, the modern-day equivalent of Grandmaster to Challenger, within a few months. He attributes this rapid ascent to watching high elo streamers and simply copying the patterns they applied in their gameplay. I attribute this to the fact that he started queuing solo. He reached high Challenger, began playing competitively, and even subbed for TSM in scrims at the age of 15. It was then that he identified a goal he’d chase for years to come: to make it in the LCS.

He got that chance with Echo Fox in the spring of 2016. In need of emergency substitutes, the team brought him on as part of a sub roster for three LCS matches. In his first LCS match against Team Liquid, his ragtag band of substitutes took a massive gold lead and all three enemy inhibitors before failing to close out the game and ultimately losing. They were quickly dispatched in their next two games, against a dominant Immortals roster that would end the split 17-1 and the eventual champions CLG.

“It was kind of fun to do, but it didn’t leave a good first impression. It would have been better not to have done that. We didn’t scrim at all; of course we were going to get destroyed,” he told me. If LCS fans didn’t get a good first impression from Armao’s initial games, such an impression was little improved by his first planned stint in the LCS. After playing one split for a mediocre Delta Fox Academy team, Armao became the jungler for Echo Fox’s second team, scrimming with the main team and occasionally subbing in for LCS games. As he tells it, Echo Fox was effectively blacklisted by other LCS teams and scrimmed their second team exclusively.

“It's two bottom tier teams scrimming each other in their own internal meta. I would scrim with the sub team, but then I would play LCS with the main team. I was playing with completely different people,” he recalls of his Echo Fox LCS experience. The lack of cohesion with the main roster was apparent in his 2017 Summer LCS matches. He posted a 2-7 game score with the team, which ultimately finished in eighth place with a 16-27 overall game score.

In the offseason ahead of 2018, Armao was hoping to join a strong Academy team where he could develop to reach the LCS potential he knew he had. He had to choose between offers from TSM Academy and the newly franchised Clutch Gaming Academy; the former offered a chance to join a storied organization that had never missed the LCS finals, the latter offered a much greater payday. Armao opted for TSM. He almost didn’t get the opportunity to choose – having played 14 games in the LCS as a substitute and having just turned 20, he was considered “too old.” (At the time, he was a few months older than Gryffin is now.) Believing that starting jungler Michael “MikeYeung” Yeung was their jungler of the future and that they would have little need of their Academy jungler, TSM signed Armao to their Academy team.

Armao’s first split with TSM Academy was, consistent with his prior experience, mediocre. He was frustrated and confident that his individual level of play was stronger than what the results had shown. He wished for a chance to play a full split on a strong team to show what he could do with a full split of practice and improvement. The monkey’s paw curled, and his wish was granted sooner than he expected.

An unexpectedly disastrous finish in Spring 2018 saw TSM knocked out in the quarterfinals for the first time in their history. The team swiftly brought Armao up to compete with MikeYeung for the starting jungle position, and it was soon determined that Armao would be the starting jungler for TSM in 2018. It was now incumbent on him to help TSM return to the LCS finals and Worlds contention. No pressure at all for one’s first full split as an LCS starter.

“[TSM] was supportive, but it’d have been nice if they had been more explicit that there's a ton of fans, you're going to get messages from people saying ‘fuck you,’ so you shouldn't read social media, all that. I underestimated that kind of thing in general,” Armao recalls of his TSM experience. The team got off to a smooth 2-0 start but was inconsistent throughout the split, barely avoiding a do-or-die tiebreaker against Optic Gaming for the final playoff spot thanks to Søren “Bjergsen” Bjerg’s heroic Akali performance against Team Liquid in the final match of the regular season.

TSM played against Armao’s old organization, Echo Fox, in the first round of the quarterfinals. TSM had lost all three matches they had played against Echo Fox this split prior to this matchup, but managed to pull off a 3-2 victory (“That was a bad series for me. I was getting shit on, straight up”). In the semifinals, TSM took a 2-1 lead against Cloud9 before their opponent subbed in a new mid laner and jungler to win the last two games, denying TSM a finals appearance for the second time (“I must have not been doing shit in the draft [in Game 5], just letting other people handle it because I was too stressed out. We had no AD damage besides Irelia, and we shouldn’t have given them [Malzahar] twice in a row”). TSM defeated 100 Thieves 3-2 in the third place match, but missed out on a finals date with Team Liquid and were relegated to the Gauntlet as their last chance to make Worlds.

TSM rematched against Echo Fox in the first round, and this time, swiftly defeated them 3-0 (“We figured them out”). In the rematch against C9, however, TSM threw their lead in the first game before getting dismantled the next two to go out with an ignominious 3-0 defeat. Armao’s recollection of the series is brief: “I think I made one bad play in Game 1 that threw the game on Zac. I didn’t play Taliyah, and Taliyah was broken, so we lost one for free. I played a Nocturne game where I sat on a ward where I was told there was no ward, and I died. It was brutal. You’re one game from finals, one series from Worlds. You’re so close. You’re right there.” Despite placing third in Summer, TSM stayed home and watched three other North American teams represent the region at Worlds. When a team in any sport falters at the final hurdle, the common refrain reminds disappointed players and fans that “there’s always next year.” For Armao, there would not be a next year. In his first split as a starter, he had come as close to qualifying for Worlds as he ever would.

Armao was intended to be the starting jungler for TSM in Spring 2019, but wrist injuries cost him the ability to practice for the first month of the new preseason patch. Looking back on it now, he tells me, “I only took a month off. So, it was kind of strange that I wasn't able to get back into the roster. They ended up deciding to not scrim with me at all because I took a total of a month off in preseason. Imagine if you had an athlete take a month off in that situation. It's not like you'd be like, ‘the football guy got injured before the season, so he can't play this season.’ But then they ended up doing really well, so they stuck with that roster and I was banished.” Indeed, TSM benched Armao in favor of Matthew “Akaadian” Higginbotham, whom Armao had played behind at Echo Fox. TSM’s decision seemed to pay off, as they reverse swept C9 in the 2019 Spring semifinals before they themselves were reverse swept by TL in the finals. Armao, in the meantime, was sent back to Academy partway through the split, where he revitalized a middling TSM Academy en route to winning the first of several Academy championships.

In light of his intended role as a starter and strong performance in Academy, TSM announced that he would be competing with Akaadian for the starting spot in the 2019 Summer Split. For a team that was one game from winning the LCS last split, this move was met with heavy skepticism. Over the first eight games of the season, TSM split the games evenly between the two junglers: Armao won all four of his games, and Akaadian won only one, despite playing against a relatively even schedule: the teams Armao played against finished with a cumulative record of 37-35, Akaadian’s with a record of 35-37. This isn’t a knock on Akaadian; he later stated publicly that the way that TSM handled the jungle spot destroyed his confidence that split. For Armao, this was a spot that he was promised a shot at, and between an Academy championship in Spring and a 4-0 start in Summer, he had done everything in his power to show he deserved it. For Akaadian, he had brought TSM back to the cusp of its former glory in Spring, and was now being told he had to fight for his position despite those results.

TSM, of course, was a team with an international pedigree they wished to return to. Perhaps this is what informed their interesting decision to stake the starting jungler spot on the 2019 Rift Rivals tournament, where the top NA teams battled the top EU teams. Armao tells me, “They said they would make the decision after Rift Rivals. I don't know if that's the best thing to tell the people playing. You have a few games and it's a life-or-death situation. It's a little bit absurd. Maybe they thought that’s the pressure you need to be under to succeed. But, looking at it now, it was pretty fucking silly. We were getting slaughtered in scrims against those teams [in Rift Rivals] regardless of who was jungling. Akaadian had one good game and I had none, so I was done after that.” Indeed he was; TSM chose Akaadian as their starting jungler, but the damage was done. The team continued to struggle, and they eventually replaced Akaadian with Academy jungler Mingyi “Spica” Lu towards the end of the season. The team ultimately lost to Clutch Gaming in the quarterfinals before falling to them again in a reverse sweep in the finals of the 2019 Gauntlet to miss out on Worlds for a second consecutive year.

“It’s a disaster when you play a whole split and then try to swap back,” Armao says. “I think the spring split should have been the time for testing both players, since I was ready before we had played any actual games.” Instead, Armao was sent back to TSM Academy to finish out the 2019 Summer Split, where he played top lane. During this time, he played with both of his TSM replacements as his jungler. Given how dramatic the situation became, I asked him about his relationship with his jungle counterparts. “You're not going to really have any problems with the other guy because you're just playing and then whatever happens happens. None of us have any influence on it. There might be something with coaching or management where a player might say, ‘Why are we doing this,’ but player-wise, it’s whatever. That was a pretty weird experience, though.”

Armao knew TSM was done with him, and his contract was acquired by Dignitas ahead of the 2020 split. His recollection of that 2020 experience was relatively brief, and, once again, he would not get the opportunity to finish out a full split in the LCS. After an uninspiring 5-7 performance to start the season, he was dropped by the team in favor of, as tradition seemed to dictate, Akaadian. Dignitas ended up missing out on playoffs by losing the tiebreaker for the last spot, while Armao was sent down to Dignitas Academy and lost in the quarterfinals.

“I think in 2019 I had a falloff because of that whole weird situation [on TSM]. In 2020, I was Rank 1 in NA, and not just early in the season. I was feeling pretty good. But we lost some games. I had some really good games, I had some bad ones, I had one really terrible Jarvan game and that was it for me. I didn’t think it was disastrous when we were losing because it’s spring, you have a lot more games to play, but clearly whoever was making the decisions thought it was disastrous and made changes quickly. There were high expectations, it was not a bad roster,” he says of his time on Dignitas. I asked him if he had any overall takeaways on his time with the organization. “Terrible. Awful.” Some things, it seems, stand the test of time.

With his stock as a player at an all-time low, Armao joined Team Liquid Academy for the 2020 Summer Split. The team performed terribly, placing tenth with an unenviable 3-15 record. Two years after playing in a series for Worlds qualification, Armao was in the basement of a second-tier league at the nadir of his career. This time, though, his organization didn’t bench him. The team replaced the three players on the bot side of the map, and Armao was called up to play in the 2021 LCS Lock-In Tournament when starting jungler Lucas "Santorin" Larsen was out with visa issues. He won two out of three games in his return to LCS, and back in Academy, the new Team Liquid Academy improved. They finished second in the regular season this time, before bombing out in the Proving Grounds tournament with a disastrous underperformance, losing both of their series without winning a game.

“The org knew we weren’t dogshit because we’d scrim the LCS team and go 40-60 against them consistently, so they weren’t going to kick us,” Armao recalls. Instead, the org called up Armao to sub for Santorin again as he was dealing with health issues. This time, it was amidst the Mid-Season Showdown semifinals. Playing against TSM, Armao took vengeance as Team Liquid defeated them, 3-1. In the finals, he once again lost to C9 3-2 after taking a 2-1 series lead. “It was a lot less pressure for me, and the meta at the time was very easy. It was Udyr/Hecarim full clear. The regret for that series was Game 4. We were in a really winning position, and we had a really clear decision which was just to hit the Elder Dragon. We would win the smite fight with Xayah E. We didn't do it, and we lost the game off of that. Nowadays, no team would make that mistake, it’s so obvious.”

Armao didn’t let the defeat get to him. He played serviceably in place of Santorin for the beginning of the 2021 LCS Summer Split, then returned to Academy to win the 2021 Academy Summer Split. In 2022, Armao and TLA started off slowly to begin the spring, but then caught fire and carved through Academy for the rest of the year. The team won both Proving Grounds finals, and Armao looked like the strongest jungler in NA Tier 2. On a strong team with players that jelled well, he found nothing but success.

A full year and a half of dominating the second-tier league usually means that one will get some looks from the big league teams. This, of course, does not take into account a crucial factor: age. By the time the 2023 offseason rolled around, Armao was turning 25. In the world of esports, this is the age of a grizzled veteran who isn’t expected to improve very much. Fans of traditional sports may find this surprising, as this is the age where athletes are considered to be just entering their prime. This remains true of sports like baseball, where, as in League, hand-eye coordination and reaction time are of supreme importance. Unlike other pro sports organizations, esports orgs often lack the luxury of time to allow talent to develop. Armao’s last full LCS split was over four years prior. The looks from big league teams did not go his way. Dominance in Tier 2 was not enough to overcome the age factor and a lack of breakout LCS performance, and Armao had no offers for Tier 1 or Tier 2 in 2023.

Instead, Armao joined the coaching staff of Cloud9 for the 2023 Spring Split as a positional coach. C9 won the LCS Coaching Staff of the Split award as C9 cruised to first place in the split and won the championship. Despite the success, coaching didn’t satisfy his competitive drive. It wasn’t surprising that he jumped at the chance to join Evil Geniuses for the 2023 Summer Split, even though it was a planned six-man roster.

With EG, it appeared as if things were finally turning around for the veteran. The team jumped out to a scorching 7-1 start. With a 9-3 record after Week 4, the team lost all three of their games in Week 5, two against the top two teams in the league. That was all it took for history to repeat itself as Armao was once again benched without finishing the split. “Scrims weren’t going as well as the games on stage, so I think they were ready to replace me. One bad week and boom, I’m gone for the rest of the season,” he describes it. An early missed smite led to a disastrous game against Golden Guardians, and a missed smite on Baron against C9 led to another loss, and EG pinned Armao as the team’s weak link.

He was sent down to finish the season with EG Challengers as EG won their remaining three games to finish third in the summer split. In the NACL, he took EGC to the finals of yet another Tier 2 season. The main roster defeated TSM in an unexpectedly close 3-2 series, and the team decided to sub Armao back in for their match against C9. “I don’t know why, I only scrimmed a day or two with the main roster before that match,” he says. EG threw a very winnable Game 1, lost Game 2, and Armao was subbed out before EG blew another lead in Game 3. He returned to the NACL team and lost 3-1 to Disguised. The next day, EG’s main roster was defeated 3-1 by TL and their season ended with a whimper.

After yet another disappointing year, Armao was offered one last chance at LCS glory. This time, Immortals was offering him a starting position. In 2024 Spring, he managed to play his first and only full split in the LCS since 2018 Summer. It did not go according to plan.

“In spring, I was actually playing well, and we just griefed the games we needed to make playoffs, which was unlucky. I definitely hit the low percentile of possible outcomes that split. In the last three games we lost, for example, it was genuinely unbelievable that we managed to lose the situations we were in.” The team showed glimpses of strength but could not close out games, blowing leads numerous times before finishing in last place with a 4-10 record. By summer, it looked like the team had checked out mentally. They began the split with a 2-0 win against Shopify Rebellion and didn’t win another game until Week 7, when they took one game in a 2-1 loss against Dignitas.

“I'm surprised it went so badly considering it looked like we had potential. We should have easily made the playoffs in Spring. In Summer we had compounding issues that were never fixed.” In his ninth year of pro play, Armao finally had a full year to play in the LCS. It was on a team that had communication issues, poor synergy, and ultimately ended in complete, utter defeat. The writing was on the wall that the dream was coming to an end, and it was time to wake up.

He describes his thought process on retirement: “If there was some sort of opportunity, it would probably be comparable to Immortals, and that was just terrible. I was like, this was not fun. Summer 2024 was a fucking nightmare. Even Spring was kind of crazy. It was definitely the right decision. I knew if I kept playing, it's going to be similar or worse to what I had already been dealing with, and it was terrible. I finally got the full year in. Didn't go well. Unlucky. Let's call it a career.” And, so, he thought, it ended.

He co-founded ProDiff (the site you are probably reading this on) in 2025. Armao began attending UCI the same year, planning to major in Applied Math. He joined the UCI Esports team as a top laner, a role he played during his climb to Challenger in Season 3 and for half a split with TSM Academy in 2019. He doesn’t go out of his way to mention his former career, although he believes that it wouldn’t matter too much as those of college age don’t play League as much as they used to. As of July 18, 2026, Armao thought his pro career was well and truly behind him.

He managed only one top three finish in the LCS, yet he remains arguably the greatest player in the history of NA Tier 2. In League of Legends, it’s often difficult to precisely determine a jungler’s individual output, regardless of what social media comments may lead one to believe. Unlike players like Kacper “Inspired” Słoma or Robert “Blaber” Huang, Armao was never set up to be the dynamic carry jungle player who teams were built around. He came up the solo queue ladder playing Lee Sin and Elise. His most played champions in pro play are Sejuani and Trundle. He became something of a professional lightning rod for criticism; the one who would be benched mid-split as a fix for a struggling team’s problems. Then he’d go down to Academy, dominate, and return to repeat the cycle. It is unlikely that there will ever be another League player who plays their first full year of Tier 1 pro play eight years after their debut match.

I ask Armao if he had any regrets or fond memories about the way his career turned out. “I think I low rolled overall, unfortunately, from all the possibilities. I think the big lost years were the TSM days in 2019 when I was starting to hit my peak; my later years were probably a lot weaker. The best part was definitely TL. And it’s cliche, but it's really just the people. I met some good people in my career. I don't dwell on what went wrong. At the end of the day, my job was to play a video game. It could be worse,” he concludes. I ask him what he would tell himself from ten and a half years ago if he had the chance. “Don’t play for Echo Fox as a sub,” he replies.

All of this is rather hard to reconcile with the reality that on July 25, 2026, I am sitting in the LCS Arena watching Armao playing an LCS match with LYON, the reigning North American champions, who recently took Hanwha Life Esports of the LCK to five games in the MSI lower bracket finals. In Game 1, LYON is completely and utterly dismantling the opposition. This is not the kind of Armao LCS game that I remember. Academy, sure. But LCS? I feel a bit bad for the FlyQuest fans in the audience – I am getting a great deal more to cheer for than they are. From my position of bias, I try to give him some credit for the performance. He smites a Gromp away from Gryffin. He lands a Jarvan E-Q-Flash onto Gryffin’s Kha’Zix in the bot lane (that’s about as mechanically intense as it gets on J4). LYON’s lanes have won so decisively that by the 23rd minute, the gold lead is 10,000. I am watching what appears to be the least stressful game a jungler could ever play. After two years of retirement, Armao wins an LCS game.

Armao recounts how he heard about the LYON opportunity. “It was Sunday [July 19] after a tennis session with my dad. We were actually at Nick’s [a restaurant in Southern California] when the text came in from the LYON manager. We were about to have the butter cake,” he recalls. The warm butter cake is an excellent choice. It would make sense to eat that first; it doesn’t take out well. “I'm doing some summer classes right now,” he explains, “I thought, can I do this? Should I do this? I haven't played jungle for two years. I realized that they can't use any currently contracted Tier 1 or Tier 2 players apparently, so they can't really use anyone. I figured they probably couldn't get anyone better. I knew some of the players, I know these guys are really good so we’re probably going to win some games even though I haven’t played jungle in years. If I hadn’t been taking classes, I would have said yes instantly." Stepping into the shoes of Inspired, the best jungler in the League, was certainly not going to lead to favorable comparisons, but for once, Armao didn’t have to worry about fighting for his career in every match.

It does not seem that studying for finals has had a great impact on the outcome of Game 2. At first, LYON falls behind nearly 4,000 gold before 20 minutes. This is the kind of Armao LCS game that I remember. Kang "Saint" Sung-in’s Viktor appears to be caught in the top lane, but LYON turns the play around and collects two shutdowns. One is the enemy jungler, so they start Baron. They secure Baron. They win the fight immediately after securing Baron. Within minutes they are now nearly 4,000 gold ahead. This is not the kind of Armao LCS game that I remember. At 28 minutes another Baron fight starts. The FlyQuest staff seated in front of me are cheering as FLY gets one pick and looks for another on Dhokla’s Volibear. Dhokla instead flashes, ults on top of Syndra, and kills her through about 2,000 HP of shielding with three button presses (that’s about as mechanically intense as it gets on Volibear). FlyQuest is half chasing the bear, half stuck in the Baron pit. Olaf stays stuck in the Baron pit and finally runs out with 20% HP towards his death as Gryffin dies to burn damage. LYON starts the Baron. They secure it, but the fight after is looking grim. Armao is fighting 1v3 in the pit. Armao is fighting 1v2 in the pit. The solo laners arrive. Armao is 20% HP. Dhokla goes in and gets nearly killed immediately. Saint narrowly avoids allowing Olaf to refresh his ultimate duration. Saint gets a kill 1v3 as Armao goes into Guardian Angel stasis. Armao resurrects and flashes in with Xin Zhao’s knockup to save Saint and himself from certain death. They kite out the Olaf, and Armao re-engages with his Sundered Sky empowered attack to ace FlyQuest and survive. LYON is now 8,000 gold ahead. I do not know what I am watching, but it is definitely not the kind of Armao LCS game I remember.

We get a late lunch on Sawtelle after the 2-0 victory. I can tell that he is feeling far less pressure than his playing days because he’s actually available after the game. When I went to games in 2018 and 2024, he was back to the PC and in a solo queue game before the next team had taken the stage. He had a reputation back in his prime for performing much better in scrims than on stage. I wonder if that was because of the immense pressure of fighting for his career under the highest levels of scrutiny. There’s not quite so much pressure now. He points out that it’s also a lot easier to win when you’re playing with a team like LYON. But as strong as LYON’s lanes are, FlyQuest is by no means a bad team – most people predicted they would beat LYON with a retired jungler in place of their star player, but Armao’s career remains unpredictable to the last.

He’s grinding scrims and solo queue to be in better shape for the remaining LCS games. I get some time after to ask him what it’s like playing with LYON compared to the rest of his career. “Playing with people this good is a great feeling. They've been trained well, so it definitely feels good. Unfortunately, not playing jungle for an extended period of time was a bit of a detriment to the initial scrim performance, but I do think we're picking it up. The game knowledge is still there, the expectations of what the jungler should do are roughly the same. The results are starting to come in with the performances,” he explains. “It can be tough for me with certain champions in scrims, too. There are some champions where if you don’t have a Korean flag on your wiki page, you should not lock them in. It doesn’t work.” I point out that none of the junglers he is set to play have Korean flags on their wiki pages, which I imagine is of some consolation. “Sometimes the coach tells us we’re not using our brains,” he continues, “and I’m just thinking, ‘I’m trying, man.’”

Speaking of using his brain, I inquire about the results of his recent final exams, which he had to take the Wednesday after the FlyQuest games. He explains to me, “I knew going in that I was definitely going to be tanking some; the physics final, I genuinely think I might have fucked that up. I probably would have needed to study eight hours a day to get that one done. But my coding final went fine. I’m fine tanking the loss of one class for beating FlyQuest Week 1. I'm taking that as a win.” I follow up by asking him whether the exam was harder than the match against FlyQuest. From the description of this exam I can predict the answer. “My physics final was ten times harder than the LCS match. That was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do. I looked at the first question and I had no clue what was going on. When we had to turn in the exam I noticed the person next to me was staring at a blank page. It made me feel a little better that at least one other person was completely clueless as well. Of course, some people were finishing it in an hour; I was like, ‘Fuck you guys.’ This class was a horrible mistake.” I remind him of the concept of a curved exam. This does little to mollify him.

Final exams are done, but Armao still has a couple more weeks filling in for Inspired. A few more games playing in the LCS team environment that he spent a decade searching for but never found. A few more matches, a few more weeks, and by the time the school year starts the epilogue to the story of a career spanning twelve years will have been written. Most people never get their swan song. Here, Armao has a chance to end on a high note, to end an LCS career riddled with what-ifs and defeats on a victory, to rewrite the last word. None of the previous chapters have been happy ones. In some stories, the ending is the best part.

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