Chip Tricks?
We did some investigative reporting and found out from tournament director Steve Frezer that the change was not intentional. Traditionally, the 5,000 chips used by the EPT are brown, so when Frezer was asked to retrieve the "new" chips from storage and found a brand-new and unused set of white 5,000 chips, he assumed he'd found what he was looking for. He later found out that the set he was supposed to retrieve was an updated version of the brown chips, which were stowed away in the opposite corner of the room.
According to Frezer, the plan to correct the problem is actually quite simple: when the Day 1a and b fields merge tomorrow afternoon for Day 2, the white chips will be taken out of play and replaced with the new brown ones.