Daniel Chutrov Amasses a Monster Stack

Most Saturday’s are busy at Celtic Park thanks it being the home to Celtic F.C. The iconic home of the Scottish Premier League champions can hold just shy of 61,000 adoring fans, but today it was a different kind of busy. Today, the air was ringing not with chants and cheers but of chips being riffled and dealers shouting “seat open.” Today was Day 1a of the inaugural Unibet Open Glasgow Main Event.

The €1,000+€100 (£800+£80) buy-in Main Event features two starting flights and the first of those is now written into the history books. A total of 109 hopefuls chose Day 1a to start their quest to become the first Unibet Open Glasgow champion, a quest that ended in vain for all but 33 of them.

One player whose quest is most definitely still on is the young Bulgarian Daniel Chutrov, who turned his 30,000 starting stack into an almost unbelievable tournament-leading stack of 539,500 over the course of nine 60-minute levels.

According to his HendonMob profile, Chutrov only has two live tournament cashes to his name, cashes that total $3,357. You wouldn’t believe this to be true if you had watched him in action today because he played with relentless yet controlled aggression throughout the day. He also ran pure in a number of key spots to go along with him playing well, which is a deadly combination that any poker player relishes.

One example of Chutrov’s run-good was when he had been playing back at Asbjorn Elvevold. After taking a pot away from him on the flop of the previous hand, Chutrov was dealt aces and got Elvevold to commit his stack with top pair. From that point on, Chutrov never looked back on his way to Monday’s Day 2.

Another was waking up with ace-king when his opponent had moved all-in with the dominated ace-jack; Chutrov could do no wrong even if he tried!

There’s a long way to go in this event but it’s highly likely that Chutrov is going to have a third cash to brag about by the time the Unibet Open Glasgow packs up and heads to its next venue.

Day 1b kicks off at 1:00pm on Sunday and should see an even larger field take part in this exciting tournament. The plan is to complete the same nine levels that the Day 1a entrants did with a 15-minute break after every two levels and an hour-long dinner break after the completion of Level 6.

Will anyone catch Chutrov? Is it even possible? Tune into the PokerNews Live Reporting pages on Sunday 7 June to find out.