Abhimanyu Mishra vs Leon Luke Mendonca (Screengrab)
BENGALURU: It was a dramatic start to Day 4 at the 2026 Global Chess League as the Ganges Grandmasters secured a 12-8 victory over the Alaskan Knights in a match defined by heartbreak, clock chaos, and a costly procedural blunder on the prodigy board.With the Alaskan Knights fighting for a match victory, prodigy Abhimanyu Mishra had successfully turned a drawn endgame against Leon Luke Mendonca into a winning attack.Down to mere seconds, Mishra executed a promotional sequence by capturing on f1 and promoting to a queen that immediately devolved into controversy.In his scramble to hit the clock, Mishra placed his new queen on the board while accidentally dropping the captured rook nearby, leaving both pieces cluttering the area.Arbiters deemed the move incomplete and illegal. Stripped of increment time, Mishra was forced to reset and retry the promotion with just one second remaining, causing him to flag instantly.“I had two or three seconds after I played rook takes f1, g takes f1, promoting to a queen,” Mishra told reporters post-game. “When I promoted, I took the queen and put the queen on the square, but somehow the rook was still in that area. The move wasn’t entirely completed. I had to retry with one second left, and I flagged.”The dramatic fault overturned what would have been a game-winning, and match-winning, triumph for his team.“I saw the entire line… I won the queen,” a gutted Mishra added. “If I won this game, we would’ve won the match as well. It was a very drawn position earlier, and I managed to start an attack. It really sucks. It hurts. What can I say?”Even Mendonca acknowledged the bitter nature of the point. “He (Leon) was apologising,” Mishra said of his opponent. “This is not how anyone wants to win a game.”Ganges’ Levon Aronian weighed in on the chaotic sequence after the match, adding, “The confusion was that his opponent made an illegal move and pressed the clock… so they had to remove the two seconds from him. He tried to promote to a queen on one second, and he didn’t manage. He lost on time.”