Media: Magnojez claims account theft in China

One of the first big LANs after the IEM Cologne 2026 Major kicked off yesterday. XSE Pro League 2026, a LAN held in Guangzhou, China was set to begin at 12:30 PM IST with TYLOO locking horns against FaZe in the opener which was a much anticipated matchup, given TYLOO's win over FaZe at BLAST Open Rotterdam.

The opening game got repeatedly pushed back by 10-15 minutes each time and no one outside the arena knew what was happening. Anders and Vince were hard at work, talking away the delays and diving deep into each and graphic shown on screen but another disaster struck when the remote casters were suddenly overwritten by the on-site casters. The audience on Kick were bombarded with English and Chinese production on top of one another with multiple echoes and random WeChat notifications.

While bots terrorized live chat on Kick, the TYLOO-FaZe opener kept getting delayed and it was later revealed by sources inside the arena that TYLOO's PCs did not have Counter-Strike 2 installed and frozen allegedly requested for a desk change after receiving a wobbly one. Upon changing frozen's desk the Slovakian star was rushed into the game server with nearly no warmup.

XSE Pro League's blunders did not end there as the second match was delayed again by nearly three hours and BIG's game against Lynn Vision was delayed by more than six hours. The German organization even ridiculed the tournament organizer on X. The final match of the day which was supposed to conclude at 03:30 PM IST began at 11:20 PM IST (~02:00 AM local time in Guangzhou)- a delay of nearly eight hours.

BetBoom's IGL took to X hours before the tournament began, announcing that Magojez's account was allegedly hacked/stolen. The Russian rifler claimed that he lost access to his account after logging into a PC in China but the allegations were taken with a hint of shade across the community given BetBoom's history with slander and blowing things out of proportion. While every single game had a tech pause, the production wasn't doing any better.

The remote casters were not given on/off air cues because of which the tournament organizer broadcasted Anders and Vince ridiculing the production quality. There were instances where the remote casters kept speaking over stage hosts during interviews. A reddit user dug out a Chinese social media post that hinted at XSE bringing in unpaid labor to work at their $1,000,000 USD event. These "volunteers" were allegedly handed out positions like assisting referee, network engineers and assisting observers.

After a bizarre opening day's play came to a close, Bjoern Wang, the COO of XinSai Esports took to X, apologizing for the "inconvenience" caused to everyone. However, the tournament organizer seems to be operating at the same level more or less, with the second day's opening game starting late as well.