You might be right about that. You don't need to change the state of the tournament, however, to get it to update. Just change screens. That is, switch to the Player Rankings screen, for example, then switch back. If your layout is a single screen, just press F2. That will "switch" to the tournament screen, but since you're already on the tournament screen and there's only one screen, it will force a refresh.
There are other options, too. Many changes to the tournament will force a screen refresh, but I believe (without looking at the code) a change to the chips adjustment will not. Easy to workaround as long as you know how. See if the F2 option works for you. If not I can dig in and see what will work.