S16 Swiss Stage Round 4 Review: iG Returns to the Quarterfinals After 2,565 Days and a Preview of Tonight’s LPL Civil War#

Text / Long Zhuiri (NTGame Editor-in-Chief)

Hello everyone, I am Long Zhuiri. In the Round 3 Closing Review, AL was eliminated with 0-3 in matches and 0-4 in games, and the LPL’s Worlds standing hit rock bottom; at the end of that piece we broke down all six Round 4 matchups game by game, and the conclusion we left was this — the civil war guarantees at least one LPL team in the quarterfinals, and if iG gets past LYON then the LPL will have two teams locked into the quarterfinals early. In the early hours of October 29 Beijing time, Round 4 of the 2026 World Championship Swiss Stage for League of Legends opened with its first night, and both 2-1 group advancement matches produced answers: T1 beat MKOI 2-0, and iG fought through three games to overturn LYON 2-1. The former rewrote the team’s knockout-stage count to an 11th time; the latter lit up a number again after 2,565 days. And tonight — at around 7 a.m. Beijing time on October 30 — the LPL civil war between BLG and TES begins. This is the fifth installment of this site’s S16 series, and as always it has two parts: first a clear review of the opening night of Round 4, then tonight’s civil war and the remaining schedule laid out and taken apart.

Let us put the key points up front; readers in a hurry only need these six:

• iG 2-1 over LYON: game one was a near-crushing win, with jungler Wei taking MVP for that game; game two was flipped by LYON jungler Inspired’s Qiyana to even the series; in the decider iG fully controlled the early lanes, and after JiaQi’s Caitlyn came online, a mid-game 0-for-4 teamfight pushed down the base — iG became the first LPL team to reach the quarterfinals at this Worlds.
• This is iG’s return to the World Championship knockout stage after 2,565 days: the last time was October 21, 2019, when iG beat TL 1:0 in the 2019 Worlds group stage — about seven years ago.
• T1 2-0 over MKOI: in game one, Doran’s Ambessa landed a raw ultimate straight onto Kai’Sa in the Dragon Soul fight, leading a 0-for-5 wipe to end the game; in game two his Gwen pressured Ornn in the top lane, establishing a ten-thousand-level gold lead early; this is T1’s 11th time reaching the Worlds knockout stage in team history, and they have never fallen before the quarterfinals in their previous 10 appearances.
• Adding GEN and DK, who advanced early at 3-0, the LCK region already has three teams locked into the quarterfinals; MKOI dropped into the 2-2 group after the loss.
• Civil war tonight: around 7 a.m. Beijing time on October 30, BLG vs TES, BO3. Both teams are 2-1; the winner takes a direct third win and advances to the quarterfinals, while the loser drops into the 2-2 group and still has a final-round chance — this is the second straight year these two teams have met in a Swiss Stage advancement round.
• Remaining Round 4 schedule: October 30 at 04:00, CFO vs KC (1-2 group, loser eliminated); October 31 at 04:00, LOS vs TLAW, and around 07:00, G2 vs HLE (both 1-2 group elimination matches).

I. Round 4 Opening Night Overview: Two Ticket Matches, Four Fates#

The format structure of Round 4 was broken down in the Round 3 Closing Review: all six matches are BO3; the winners of the three 2-1 group matches advance directly to the quarterfinals and the losers fall into the 2-2 group; the losers of the three 1-2 group matches are eliminated directly. The two matches played on the opening night happened to both be 2-1 group quarterfinal ticket matches, scheduled at around 04:00 and 07:00 Beijing time on October 29:

With those two played, the quarterfinal list expanded from two seats to four:

The regional reading of this table is straightforward: three LCK seats are in the bag, and the LPL takes its first through iG; the LPL’s second seat will be produced directly in tonight’s civil war. Over the remaining two competition days, the three 1-2 group elimination matches decide who climbs into the 2-2 final round, and the final round then decides the last three quarterfinal tickets — the Swiss Stage accounting only truly enters its endgame here.

II. iG 2-1 LYON: A Three-Act Play, and the Arc of 2,565 Days#

First, the starting lineups and side selection for both teams that day (iG first pick on red side, LYON second pick on blue side):

First, a word on the opponent’s caliber: LYON are no unknowns — in Round 3 they took the first game and pushed GEN to the brink of a reverse sweep, and this team’s competitiveness in the first two games of a BO3 was already recorded in the Day 3 Review. The script of this BO3, taken apart in three acts.

Act One: The Crushing Game#

Game one was close to a crushing win for iG, pressing LYON’s tempo from start to finish and taking the first game cleanly. This game’s MVP went to jungler Wei — he was the tempo engine of game one, and this was the game that pushed the series into iG’s own script.

Act Two: Qiyana’s Reply#

Game two changed character entirely. LYON jungler Inspired pulled out Qiyana and took complete control of the mid-game tempo: two consecutive Dragon Soul fights won, followed by a 0-for-4 wipe that pushed straight through iG’s base, tying the series 1-1. This game’s MVP also went to a jungler — Inspired used a textbook mid-game operation to tell iG that this quarterfinal ticket would not be handed over for free.

Act Three: Caitlyn’s Finish#

In the decider, iG pulled the game back onto their own track: the early lanes were fully controlled, JiaQi’s Caitlyn grew more threatening as items came online, and after a mid-game 0-for-4, iG pushed down LYON’s base in one breath — the series ended there.

Read the three acts together and two things are worth circling. First, the MVPs of games one and two both came from the jungle position — Wei and Inspired, one attacking and one defending, made the jungle matchup the first two main storylines of this series. Second, the deciding factor in game three shifted to the bot lane, with JiaQi’s Caitlyn taking over the scepter that ends games. Going the full three games and winning each one differently is the part of this series that carries more information than “they won” itself: in the knockout stage, teams with a single way to win are the easiest to target, and iG have already put at least three answers on the table.

2,565 Days: The Two Ends of an Arc#

Now reel time back to 2019. On October 21, 2019, in the 2019 Worlds group stage, iG beat TL 1:0 to advance to that year’s knockout stage — and after that day, this team never touched the threshold of the Worlds knockout stage again: rosters changed, troughs were sunk into, and only today, 2,565 days later, did they take LYON apart in a 2-1 group BO3 and reconnect that broken line.

Incidentally, the TL that stood opposite iG in the 2019 group stage and the North American first seed competing this year under the TLAW name (the TL of this site’s own usage) are two faces of the same club in different eras — in the Round 3 Closing Review, it was this very TLAW that sent AL home 2-0. Seven years ago iG stepped over TL into the quarterfinals; seven years later TL sent AL home, and iG have come back themselves.

The coordinate system of the fourth seed also deserves a table (media tally figures):

The same iG that fell in the play-in as the fourth seed last year without even touching the main event is again the fourth seed this year, yet has written itself into the best tier of this curve. In the Worlds history of the fourth seed, WBG in 2023 and 2024 proved how far this seat can go — iG are now taking up the same baton, and by a more winding route.

iG’s trajectory this year is recorded across the first three installments of this site’s series: a first-round loss to GEN (one of the China-Korea openers flagged in the Swiss Stage Draw Preview), a second-round win over TSW that stopped the slide (the Round 2 Life-or-Death Day), a 1-0 dismantling of HLE on Day 3 for the LPL’s first win over the LCK (the Day 3 Review), and then this morning’s 2-1 over LYON. Loss, win, win, win — the endpoint of this rising curve is a quarterfinal ticket 2,565 days late.

III. T1 2-0 MKOI: The Other Side of a Record Night#

The other ticket that night went to T1.

The decisive moment of game one came in the Dragon Soul fight: Doran’s Ambessa landed a raw ultimate directly onto MKOI’s Kai’Sa, leading a 0-for-5 wipe that ended the game there, with the game’s MVP credited to Doran. Game two had a draft change: Doran switched to Gwen, pressuring Ornn in the top lane and establishing a ten-thousand-level gold lead early, and T1 closed out game two steadily. With both games done, MKOI never found an answer to either one — two MVP-level top-lane performances put the topic of the “meta top laner” squarely on the table.

This 2-0 makes it the 11th time in team history that T1 has reached the World Championship knockout stage — and in their previous 10 appearances, they never fell before the quarterfinals. Put another way: T1’s floor at Worlds is the quarterfinals. Put this record next to GEN’s (seven straight quarterfinal appearances since 2020, see the Day 3 Review) and the LCK’s stability reserve is plain to see — on one side, a front man who has never missed the knockout stage in eleven tries; on the other, seven unbroken years of quarterfinals. That the three LCK teams came ashore first this year is not without reason.

For MKOI, the script closed its first half that night: the dark horse that upset BLG in the opening-round BO1 (the bewilderment of that moment was recorded in the Round 2 Life-or-Death Day), which got past CFO in Round 2 to lead at 2-0 at one point, then hit the LCK bloc in BO3s in two straight rounds, with its dark-horse quality tested repeatedly before finally dropping into the 2-2 group to face the Swiss Stage’s life-or-death examination. This trajectory assembled into a table:

The smooth sailing of the first two rounds set against the BO3 hard-fought battles of the last two is stark in the same table: the position gained by upsetting people in BO1 ultimately has to be defended by systemic depth in the long games of BO3 — the most common trajectory for a dark horse like MKOI in the back half of the Swiss Stage.

IV. Four Seats Settled: The Picture Rearranged and the LPL’s New Math#

After the opening night of Round 4, the situations of the sixteen teams were reshuffled:

Two regional readings:

• LCK: three seats in the bag (GEN, DK, T1), with HLE still in the 1-2 group — the October 31 match against G2 decides whether the LCK can make it a full four.
• LPL: iG’s seat is already cashed in; tonight’s civil war guarantees at least one more, while the ceiling depends on how the civil war’s loser performs in the final round.

In the Round 3 Closing Review we calculated that before Round 4 began, the range of the LPL’s quarterfinal count was 1 to 3; with iG past LYON, the floor of that range has been raised from 1 to 2 — the only remaining suspense is whether tonight’s civil war loser can grab the LPL’s third seat back in the final round. In other words, the LPL’s worst case (only one team left) is now impossible, and the best case (three teams) is still in their own hands.

V. Preview of Tonight’s Civil War: BLG vs TES in Three Layers#

Tonight’s main event, in three layers.

Layer One: Format and Consequences#

Around 7 a.m. Beijing time on October 30 — for viewers staying up for the stream tonight, an all-nighter — BLG vs TES, BO3. This is the second LPL civil war of this Swiss Stage: the first came in Round 2, when TES beat AL for their first win. Unlike that one-shot BO1, the winner of this civil war takes a direct third win and advances to the quarterfinals on the spot; the loser drops into the 2-2 group and must fight another life-or-death match in the final round before the Swiss Stage closes. The Round 3 Closing Review covered the difference in strategic depth between BO3 and BO1 civil wars, so we will not expand on it here — one addition only: when teams who know each other inside out play three games, the thickness of the cards in hand is the scale of victory.

Layer Two: A Duel of Fate#

This match carries one more layer of fate: BLG and TES have now met in a World Championship Swiss Stage advancement round for two straight years. There is no better explanation for the same scene playing twice than that both teams have long occupied the same strength tier in the Swiss Stage advancement groups — strength pressed close, records pressed close, even the draw pressed close. For LPL viewers this is the most complicated kind of viewing experience: whoever wins is worth celebrating, whoever loses is genuinely a shame, and the format nevertheless demands that one team send the other to the 2-2 cliff.

Layer Three: Form and Matchups#

Both teams’ trajectories this year are already recorded round by round on this site (results sourced from the first three installments of the series):

On form, each team has one card face up. On the BLG side, after the Round 3 win over KC, media named two recovery signals: mid laner Knight’s form recovering, and top laner Bin’s lane dominance on Ambessa and Camille being brought up repeatedly. On the TES side, 369’s Ambessa has carried games twice already — from overturning AL in the civil war to crushing G2 head-on, this top laner, who stepped in temporarily after a visa issue, is now TES’s most reliable piece. So tonight’s top-lane matchup naturally becomes the focus: Bin vs 369, two players who have both put in dominant performances on Ambessa; whoever gets their own meta answer first in the BO3 takes half the burden off their mid and bot lanes.

The civil war carries one more unique variable: facing a team from the same region means there are no information blind spots — scrim habits and draft tendencies are an open book to each other. In such cases, what is tested is not who hides deeper, but who adapts faster in the moment — in that Round 2 civil war between TES and AL, the deciding factor came down to a few decision-making moments around the Baron pit, and tonight’s three pauses between games give a window for adjustments every single minute. Here are the face-up cards both teams have put on the table as of the opening night of Round 4, side by side:

The cards beyond those face up, neither team will show before the match — which is exactly the best reason to stay up for a BO3 civil war.

Finally, as always, the ugly truth up front: the quarterfinal draw will not happen until the Swiss Stage finishes entirely on October 31, and there are currently no matchup results, so this article makes no projections about the quarterfinal pairings. The only thing certain about tonight is this: when you wake up tomorrow morning, the quarterfinal list will contain one more LPL team.

VI. Series Recap and Remaining Schedule at a Glance#

After this piece, the thread of this series runs as follows, with the four previous installments each covering one round, while this piece deals only with the fact layer of Round 4:

• October 19, Swiss Stage Draw Preview: the play-in closes, first-round matchups are out, the four LPL teams draw no civil wars, with two China-Korea clashes in the same round.
• October 25, Round 2 Life-or-Death Day: the four LPL teams lose all their Round 1 matches, TES beats AL in the civil war for the first win, and AL falls to 0-2.
• October 27, Day 3 Review: iG dismantles HLE for the LPL’s first win over the LCK, and DK and GEN are the first to reach the quarterfinals.
• October 28, Round 3 Closing Review: AL’s 0-3 exit sets the worst record ever for a first seed, and the six Round 4 matchups are announced.
• October 29, this piece: iG returns to the quarterfinals after 2,565 days, T1 steps into the knockout stage for the 11th straight year, and tonight’s civil war decides the LPL’s second seat.

The three remaining Round 4 matches, plus the structure of the final round, in one table:

(Matches marked “approx.” are estimated time slots given by media; the exact start times are subject to the official final schedule; the 2-2 group final round schedule had not been announced at the time of writing.)

And the LPL’s seat math, nailed down into a table:

To sum it up in one sentence: the LPL’s quarterfinal count is locked between 2 and 3 — tonight’s civil war decides the name on the second seat, and the final round decides whether there is a third.

Conclusion: A Ticket 2,565 Days in the Making, and a Boarding Pass Someone Must Tear Up#

It is the evening of October 29 as I write this, a few hours before tonight’s civil war. The editorial room is already splitting up the all-night shift — BLG vs TES starts before 7 a.m., so by the time the civil war is done the sky will be light. Some complain that the schedule is unfriendly to domestic viewers; I take the opposite view, that getting to watch a civil war played in an advancement round is rare good news amid the string of bad news these past few days: at least when you wake up tomorrow morning, the quarterfinal list will definitely contain an LPL team, and iG have already caught the breath of that “after 2,565 days” for us.

What is 2,565 days, really? The last time iG advanced to the knockout stage, someone in the editorial room was still a college freshman, and now that person’s child is almost in elementary school. This is the most ruthless thing about sports competitions — seven years can change everything, except the rule of the ticket: to reach the quarterfinals, win these three games in front of you. Tonight, one of BLG and TES must do that, and one must face the 2-2 cliff.

That is the Swiss Stage: it will give you a 2,565-day wait, and it will also give you a life-or-death decision that must be settled overnight.

See you on the Rift.

— Long Zhuiri, NTGame Editor-in-Chief