Counter-Strike pro somehow gets banned for life twice after stealing other players' kit at IEM Dallas, blames the ganja

Counter-Strike pro player Adam "nbgee12" Zanzoul has been barred from IEM Dallas 2024 and permabanned from the FACEIT platform after being caught stealing SSDs from his fellow competitors (as first reported by Dust 2). Almost unbelievably, this comes around two months after the ESL had commuted a previous 100 year-ban imposed on Zanzoul thanks to new policies and, to stretch credulity even further, Zanzoul says it's all down to the demon weed. 

The incident took place in the small hours on May 31st, after the 19 year-old Zanzoul gained entry to a backstage area containing other players' equipment. Zanzoul helped himself to SSDs belonging to his fellow professionals Jake «Stewie2K» Yip, Nikola «NiKo» Kovač, and Guy «NertZ» Iluz.

Reports of the incident first began surfacing on social media, before Zanzoul granted an interview to fellow player and streamer Collin «CoJoMo» Moren in which they discuss what happened. Zanzoul admits taking the three SSDs from a larger pile of hardware, then taking them back to his hotel room at the Omni Dallas Hotel (which is connected to the event venue).

Zanzoul's «tl;dr» version of events is that he went to the venue at 4am, and was «let into the venue during the night, I was somewhere I wasn't supposed to be and took stuff.» If you're wondering why there was a big pile of SSDs just sitting around, these contain individual players' configurations and settings for matches, but are held by event organisers over the duration to ensure competitive integrity and smoother setups for matches. 

Zanzoul goes on to say he was detained by Dallas Police after ESL staff, drum roll please, saw evidence of him doing it on security footage. The SSDs were returned and the ESL decided not to press charges, but banned him for five years before the next day upgrading this to a permanent ban. 

Here's the good part. Explanations? Zanzoul has lots of them. Maybe it was just trolling, he rather implausibly suggests. Or that he's a self-confessed «moron»,