WSOP Circuit Legend Maurice Hawkins Involved in Florida Fist Fight

Maurice Hawkins has delivered a few bad beats in his time. There’s the moment he didn’t reveal a player had the winning hand against him and the dealer missed it, helping Hawkins go on to win a tournament. There are other occasions too for the 21-time WSOPC winner. On Thanksgiving, however, Hawkins took a hit of his own, after his boasts of greatness at both poker and boxing set one opponent to challenge one of those brags.

Hawkins Provokes Opponent with Poker Boast

For a man who has won $6.6 million in live ranking events alone, the wisdom of playing a private home game on Thanksgiving night might seem odd to say the least. Where is the holiday spirit, the canned turkey, the friends and family. Well, for Maurice Hawkins, a decision to watch sports and fight at the felt got all too real on Thursday evening.

Playing a home game in Palm Beach County, Florida, Hawkins allegedly boated to his tablemates about how great he was at both poker and boxing before one opponent decided to test one of those statements with action rather than words. The man, wearing a white t-shirt and baseball cap, snapped, assaulting Hawkins with a series of sweeping punches to the side of his head. Far from leaping from his chair and ‘putting them up’, Hawkins cowered in the corner, shielding himself from the beating of a lifetime.

After the rather one-side ‘fight’, Hawkins got up to argue with his opponent, who seemed to offer his nemesis a chance to go ‘double or nothing’ which for all of his words, Hawkins didn’t fancy.

Here’s how the initial fight went down.

Enemies Line Up to Join the Pile-On

While the attack on Hawkins or the Hawkins fight (delate as you find appropriate) looked brutal, both men were up and about in no time and Hawkins himself was as lucid as he ever gets when he went on X to spill his guts.

“The Narratives are hilarious,” Hawkins wrote. “A guy tried to sucker punch me and sneak attack me while I am in my seat. Then you post I got my ass whooped. F**king hilarious. What you think happens if I don’t get grabbed? When I got to my feet. Here you go. The truth of what happened.”

While the above quote has been corrected for grammar so you could find it legible, those are Hawkins’ exact words, hinting at a flush of anger provoking his social media response.

Of course, anyone who watched the video on X didn’t see it that way, leading to another deluge of descriptive words to overcompensate.

A History of Poker Violence

While the Hawkins fight is by no means something to trivialise in its entirety – violence is never a way to solve a disagreement – it is by far from the only time poker has turned the air blue and the red mist has descended. Just last year, an incident at the Red Rock Poker Room saw a player knocked clean out in the literal sense when a post-game breakdown went too far.

In Texas, a row between a mature man and his younger adversary saw chairs thrown and a security guard break out his Taser gun to end the acrimony. The fight was not the only altercation in The Lone Star State, with gunfire interrupting – but not ending – a cash game hand in one Houston cardroom. Players ducked under the table but kept their hands on their cards to stay in the hand!

As far back as the dawn of poker, violence has played its part in the beautiful game. Wild Bill Hickok was shot to death while holding the ‘Dead Mans Hand’ of aces and eights in Deadwood South Dakota on August 2^nd, 1876. Doyle ‘Texas Dolly’ Brunson saw a man gunned down at the felt due to a familial dispute. In recent years, an even scarier showdown occurred when Nik Airball squared up to Matt Berkey and blew a kiss at him.

Maurice Hawkins may consider himself lucky.