Poker Player Penalized for Expletives After Refusing to Color Up Deep in WSOP Event

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Jun 09, 2025 3 min read Last updated Jun 12, 2025

A poker player was given a one-round penalty deep in a 2025 World Series of Poker (WSOP) event for swearing at a floor manager after refusing to color up.

Tyler Brown, a 2023 bracelet winner, is the player in question. He wasn't frustrated following a bad beat. The penalized poker pro was among the chip leaders at the time in Event #28: $600 Mixed No-Limit Hold'em/Pot-Limit Omaha Deepstack with around 30 players remaining out of 1,499 entries on Monday.

What Tilted Poker Player

Brown, who has over $3.1 million in live tournament cashes, isn't known for being belligerent at the poker table, and he is in the mix for the $178,126 first-place prize. But a request from the tournament staff angered the poker pro. He explained to PokerNews on a break what went down.

"(Staff) came by in the middle of a level and they wanted to color up my chips,"Brown explained. "I don't think I'd ever refused a color up doing this. But they wanted every single chip that I had that wasn't a 100k chip. So, I offered them giving them 2 million instead of 3 million, and keep two stacks of green. They refused, and they said they needed a full rack of green. I continued to refuse until they could give me an official ruling."

World Series of Poker staff told PokerNews the player was not penalized due to refusing to color his chips up. He was instead sent briefly to the rail because "he told another floor to 'go f**k himself.'

Brown continued to say that floor explained to him that the hand he was currently in was dead "because they needed to pull me away to talk to me." He claims the floor manager then told him that he never offered to exchange 2 million worth of 100k chips and "that I was refusing entirely."

"I may have yelled an expletive," Brown said.

That expletive, as he explained, got him in some hot water with the tournament staff. He was given a one-round penalty and faced potential disqualification deep in a bracelet event had he continued arguing with the floor manager. But he wasn't concerned with that happening.

"I would understand that. I think that they had no grounds to DQ me, personally. So, I felt really strongly about that. They had even threatened to over the color up situation. They threatened to DQ me, which is unbelievable. I was okay with a one-round penalty. I shouldn't have said what I said. I'm okay losing two big blinds."

"I felt like I wanted to prove a point. They escalated the situation way beyond where it needed to be."

Rule 106 in the WSOP rulebook states: "Floor staff control the number and denomination of chips in play and can initiate discretionary color-ups, which should be announced."

Did Brown iron things out with the floor manager who gave him a one-round penalty?

"I don't know about that. I'm not going to continue causing issues, but I don't know if we're on good terms," Brown answered.

Brown still had a monster stack at the time of publishing on Day 2. You can follow his run via PokerNews' live reporting coverage.

Follow Continued Coverage of the $600 Mixed Event at PokerNews

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