Emil Malikov Has 9.95M Chips, Zero Recorded Earnings, and the $600 Deepstack Lead

Emil Malikov has 9,950,000 chips, no recorded lifetime earnings, and an Azerbaijan flag next to his name on the WSOP Event #10 leaderboard. He leads the $600 Deepstack No-Limit Hold'em final table at the Horseshoe by a margin so wide it barely qualifies as a contest — his stack is more than four times the next-closest player's.

And almost nobody at that table has a résumé, either.

The Stack Gap

Malikov's 9.95M puts him in a position that most first-time final-tablists never experience: genuine commanding leverage. Adam Cohen sits second with 2,345,000 — less than a quarter of what Malikov is holding. Behind Cohen, the stacks compress into a narrow band: Paawan Bansal at 1,835,000, Ronald Klaver at 1,800,000, and TJ Shulman at 1,725,000.

Malikov's 9.95M stack is more than four times the next-closest player's — and this is the first time his name has appeared in any WSOP result.

The arithmetic is stark. If Malikov were to simply fold every hand from here, he'd still be a factor deep into three-handed play. He won't fold every hand. That's what makes this interesting.

The Table Nobody Knows

What makes this final table unusual isn't that it has an unknown chip leader. Unknowns lead $600 final tables every summer. What's unusual is that the entire table is functionally anonymous.

Malikov has zero bracelets, zero rings, and no lifetime earnings on record. Cohen: same. Klaver: same. Bansal has $98,631 in lifetime earnings and one prior final table — the most visible tournament track record at the table besides Shulman's.

Shulman is the outlier, but only barely. He holds two WSOP Circuit rings and $341,802 in lifetime cashes across nine career final tables. That makes him, by a wide margin, the most decorated player remaining. At most WSOP final tables, Shulman's résumé would rank near the bottom. Here, it's the ceiling.

For Malikov, the biographical details are thin. He's listed under Azerbaijan — country code AZ — making him, by all available records, the first player from the Caucasus region to lead a WSOP final table this summer. No Twitter handle. No player photo on file. No prior cashes in the WSOP database. The chip count is, for now, the entire biography.

What 9.95M Actually Means

A 4:1 chip lead at a short-handed final table in a $600 event is not the same thing as a 4:1 lead at a $10K Championship. The structure is faster, the average stack depth is shallower, and the pay jumps between spots are compressed. All of that favors the big stack — but it also means confrontations happen quickly and the gap can close in a single cooler.

Bansal, the Indian player with one prior final table and just under $100K lifetime, sits third and is the only player besides Shulman who has demonstrated he can handle a final-table spot before. Whether that translates at the Horseshoe with a bracelet on the line is a different question.

Shulman, meanwhile, has been here nine times. Two of those runs ended with Circuit rings. None ended with a bracelet. He's 1,725,000 chips short of the lead and has the most experience navigating exactly this kind of deficit.

The Bracelet or the Footnote

Malikov's name doesn't appear in any historical WSOP results. No Circuit stops, no online events, no side-event min-cashes. He materialized in the $600 Deepstack field and emerged on the other side with the biggest stack at the final table.

If he converts, he goes from literally zero recorded tournament dollars to a gold bracelet in a single event — the kind of origin story the WSOP markets department scripts but can never actually manufacture.

If he doesn't, the stack was still real. The lead was still 4:1. And the next time his name shows up on a leaderboard, someone will remember the night an Azerbaijani player nobody had heard of held almost 10 million chips at the Horseshoe and the entire rail had to Google where he came from.