BDG Ronaldo Banned for Stream Sniping His EUW Rank 1 Climb

He posted "R1" on Tuesday. By Friday morning Riot had wiped all 4,697 LP off his account and banned him.

Here's what actually happened, and why it might not be over.

Ranked News

Rank 1, Then Banned

Patch 26.15 · July 31, 2026

He posted "R1" on Tuesday. By Friday morning Riot had wiped all 4,697 LP off his account and banned him.

What Happened

On July 29, Ronaldo, a Romanian mid laner who plays for Bulldog Esports in the NLC, posted a single screenshot with the caption "R1". It showed him sitting at the top of the EUW Challenger ladder on 4,697 LP with an 891-738 record across Split 3 of the 2026 season. Rank 1 on the biggest server in the West. That's the kind of screenshot you frame.

The climb that started it: Rank 1 on EUW at 4,697 LP, posted July 29.

If the name doesn't ring a bell, that's because he's a ladder name more than a stage one. Ronaldo has been circling the top of EUW for years, with Challenger peaks on record going back to 2019, and he built his following streaming solo queue rather than playing on the big broadcasts. His pro career is regional: he signed with Bulldog Esports in May and plays in the NLC, the league covering the UK, Ireland and the Nordics. That's what makes this sting. He's genuinely good, which is exactly why so many people believed the climb.

Roughly 48 hours later, Riot quote-tweeted it and took the whole thing away.

Riot's Reply, In Public, On The Same Post

The response came from Drew Levin (@drewlevin on X), who works in product and strategy on League of Legends and has become the public-facing address players send ranked integrity reports to. He didn't send a quiet email. He replied directly under the victory lap, at 12:03 AM on July 31, and the post has since cleared 3.6 million views.

Riot's ruling, posted as a public reply to the Rank 1 screenshot itself.

The Ruling

The Finding

Riot concluded he repeatedly violated their policy against stream sniping during the Rank 1 climb, after several players sent in evidence

The Suspension

Account banned for two weeks

The Rewards

No ranked rewards for the season that just ended

The LP

Reverted from Challenger 4,697 LP all the way down to Master 0

Riot's own wording was the part that made people sit up. In the ruling, Levin wrote:

"While many of your results are legitimate, your abuse of stream sniping for advantage taints your climb, and we will not allow it to stand."

Riot's creator conduct policy has said the quiet part out loud for a while now: stream sniping is explicitly against the rules, and players who do it may be penalized. What nobody had really seen before was Riot enforcing it against the number one account on a major server, in public, two days after that account had been celebrated.

How Do You Even Prove This?

That was the first question everyone asked, and it's a fair one. Reviewing hundreds of games against a streamer's VOD timeline sounds impossible.

The Bans Gave It Away

The theory players kept landing on is that you don't need to watch the games, you need to read the ban phase. Someone whose ban changes every single game, and keeps landing on the exact champion a one-trick on the enemy team is about to lock in, is producing a pattern no ordinary player produces.

Champ Select Callouts

Others pointed at the stream itself, describing him naming enemy one-tricks in champ select and asking for target bans before there was any legitimate way to know who he'd been matched against.

Level 1 Knowledge

The most damning version of the argument is the simplest: a player who counters invades and weird level 1 setups he had no information about isn't reading the game well, he's reading a second monitor.

The Skeptics

Not everyone was convinced any single clip proves it. At the very top of the ladder the player pool is tiny, and knowing who's queueing at the same time as you isn't automatically cheating. The counterargument is volume: one lucky ban is a coincidence, a season of them is a habit.

Perspectives paraphrased from various Reddit threads.

So Is Two Weeks Actually The Punishment?

On paper, two weeks is nothing. Plenty of players have eaten harsher suspensions for typing. But the suspension isn't really the penalty here, the LP rollback is. Going from 4,697 LP to Master 0 erases something like 156 net wins, which is months of play, and it's the part he can't wait out.

And that's where this gets genuinely interesting. Levin's feed isn't the feed of someone winding an investigation down. He regularly bundles up eleven or twelve hundred player reports at a time and hands them to Riot's anticheat and inting review teams. Two days before this ruling, he publicly told a player that the "bronze" account they'd won five games with belonged to a professional boosting service. He is clearly still reading.

So the account comes back in mid-August, sitting at Master 0, with the entire server watching every ban it makes. Riot said this climb wouldn't be allowed to stand. They didn't say anything about what happens if there's a next one.

Related Reading

If you want to know what's actually strong on the ladder he's about to climb back through, our solo queue tier list is updated every patch, and the Patch 26.15 notes rundown covers everything that changed this cycle.