The last day of the Global Chess League Season 4 round robin at The Lalit Ashok turned the table upside down and then left it exactly where it was. Alpine APL Pipers and Ganges Grandmasters both went into Saturday needing only to beat a team from the bottom of the standings to book their place in the final. Both lost. All three teams at the foot of the table won. And when the last game finished, the two teams that had lost were still the two teams going through.

Final standings after the round robin

Fifteen game points separate first from last after ten matches each, and the teams finish in three pairs on level match points, so every position in the table is settled on the game-point tiebreak.

Alpine APL Pipers 6-11 Triveni Continental Kings, 5:00 PM

Triveni became the first team all season to beat the Pipers twice, and they did it by handing Magnus Carlsen his first individual loss of the league. Alireza Firouzja, who had gone the entire season without a win, chose the Grunfeld against him. Carlsen conceded pawn structure and king safety to build an attack with h4-h5, but Firouzja's counterplay in the centre arrived first and Carlsen collapsed after dropping a pawn on move 28. The Frenchman had resignation after 49 moves. "It was a good game and after a sharp opening I found some good moves," Firouzja said, adding that he applied pressure once both players were short of time.

Aravindh Chithambaram scored the other Triveni win, against his compatriot Vidit Gujrathi, sacrificing a piece with 26.Nf4 for a direct attack on the king after navigating the complications that followed White's 22.Ng4. Volodar Murzin's win over Pranav Venkatesh was the Pipers' only point on the board, and it mattered: it took them to 88 game points, which turned out to be the number that decided the tournament. Alexandra Kosteniuk, who drew Koneru Humpy, said real champions are defined by how they handle hard situations, and that she was proud the team closed the qualification stage with a win.

PBG Alaskan Knights 9-7 Ganges Grandmasters, 6:30 PM

Once Alpine had lost, Ganges needed exactly one game point from this match to finish above them, and they were never in danger of that, but they lost anyway. Ian Nepomniachtchi drew Vishy Anand on the Icon board, and Stavroula Tsolakidou beat Nino Batsiashvili to put the Grandmasters in front, before PBG's two teenagers took the match.

Abhimanyu Mishra beat Leon Luke Mendonca in a French Defence, a rematch of the Day 4 game he had thrown away when he failed to complete a promotion legally with a second on his clock. He called it karma and said it was nice to see justice served, then compared his knight on d6 to Kasparov's octopus knight against Karpov in 1985. Yagiz Kaan Erdogmus won the other game, with Leinier Dominguez losing on time after scattering the pieces in a scramble played without increment. Erdogmus said he had backed himself because he has far more practice at fast chess, and that it made good content. Anand summarised his two young teammates as players whose wins looked chaotic, but they always pull them off.

CheQ Mumba Masters 11-6 FYERS American Gambits, 8:00 PM

FYERS needed to win and to score at least nine game points to displace Alpine. They got six and lost the match. Four of the six games were decisive. Javokhir Sindarov produced the pick of them, equalising against Maxime Vachier-Lagrave's Catalan with the freeing break 11...c5 backed by a temporary pawn sacrifice, then giving up a second pawn to activate his queenside majority, with the c-pawn deciding it. It is Chess.com's Game of the Day.

It was also the only game FYERS won. Carissa Yip beat Sara Khadem in an ending where Black could have held a pawn down. Bardiya Daneshvar won when Marc'Andria Maurizzi played 24...Bxe4, losing a piece to the intermediate 25.Nxd6, which ended the game on the spot. Pranesh M closed it out against Nihal Sarin, better on the board but helped by the clock, with Nihal unable to make his moves in time without an increment. Pranesh noted he had been winning against Nihal in their earlier meeting and lost on time himself, so this one was payback. Vachier-Lagrave, who lost his own game, said his team delivered and that Sindarov played an amazing game, but that the match win was what counted.

What Day 8 settles

Ganges Grandmasters finish top on 18 match points and 95 game points, Alpine APL Pipers second on 18 and 88, and the two meet in Sunday's final, a repeat of the pairing nobody expected after a day on which both of them lost. Irina Krush, on commentary, compared it to the 2013 Candidates, where both leaders also lost the last round and Carlsen went on to win the event and then the world title.

FYERS American Gambits and CheQ Mumba Masters finish third and fourth, separated by a single game point, and play each other again on Sunday in the third-place match, less than a day after meeting in the round robin. Triveni Continental Kings and PBG Alaskan Knights, the two teams that beat the eventual finalists, end fifth and sixth, one game point apart.

Watch the final live

Sunday 13 September closes Season 4 with two matches at The Lalit Ashok, each a best-of-two. The third-place match between FYERS American Gambits and CheQ Mumba Masters starts at 3:30 PM IST, and the final between Alpine APL Pipers and Ganges Grandmasters at 6:30 PM IST. Stream free on the Global Chess League YouTube channel