Who is Chip Guy? He’s not an extension of myself, his views and mine do not necessarily align, in fact often he doesn’t even align with his own views. Chip Guy came into existence on July 10th, 2026 as a mental distraction during a period of depression.
After conceiving the idea, I made the first strip, Main Event Registration, which was done with a detailed script, using generative ai. All the words, concepts, design elements, frame layouts and configurations are mine, ai is only used to generate the images, not to create the ideas or the scripts. Within a week, i’d made a dozen strips and the ideas kept flowing.
It wasn’t until i had made over 40 strip that I started posting them, twice per week, Tuesdays and Thursdays. This began in late August. Sometimes the strips are very topical and there’s a need to publish additional strips per week, which has happened two or three times so far. There are also some strips which are posted first on Twitter, rather than here on Substack.
Chip Guy Extras is where strips that were published outside the main numbered schedule will be posted. Some of these are in-jokes for a small audience and not suited to wider release. I’ll explain the context when I post Chip Guy Extras, which is likely to be once per week (and not every week). Apart from this initial post, future Chip Guy Extras will be published on Sundays.
So, here’s the first Chip Guy Extras strip. This one is called Phone Ban and was created at the time when there was news of some poker venues banning the use of phones at the table, due to concerns about cheating by using cameras to peek at cards during the elevated pitch, the traditional way that poker has been dealt in America, for as long as anyone can remember.
In Europe, especially in the UK, there is a preference for slide dealing, which effectively prevents this form of cheating. Some US casinos have now adopted slide dealing in their poker rooms, rather than banning the use of phones.
The scene in this strip should be familiar to anyone who has seen the Martin Scorsese movie Casino.
Phone Ban was first posted on September 1st, in the comments sections of a Twitter post relating to this topic, but hasn’t been exposed to a wider audience yet. Should it be added to the main numbered collection? Let me know in the comments.
Chip Guy (Jonathan Raab)