Breaking Rocks

God put rocks on this earth to bedevil mankind. Chain-gang prisoners hammering boulders and slaves schlepping up 20-ton blocks to build the pyramids are classic symbols of oppressive servitude. For millennia, hailstones have flattened farmers' crops while stones in the fields have shattered their plows. In the book The Devil and Daniel Webster, exactly such an incident made an exasperated farmer decide to sell his soul to the devil.

Sportsmen like you and me are in special peril of rocks. They crack the oil pans of our off-road vehicles, gouge the bottoms of our skis, overturn our white-water rafts, and sweep us off mountains. Most heinous of all, at the poker table they hurt our bankrolls and our dispositions by their maddeningly tight play.

"What's the big deal?" you ask. Why get upset about a common rock? Let me tell you something. Scientists now generally accept the theory that a single rock killed off all dinosaurs on earth 65 million years ago. Of course, it was a very big rock, miles across, and moving very fast, and when it struck the earth just off the Yucatan Peninsula, it set off gigantic firestorms and sent up so much dust and smoke that the sun was blocked and temperatures plummeted and plants died and dinosaurs couldn't find anything or anybody to eat, and it was just terrible.

Rocks are bad news.

Experts will tell you that overly tight players are no real threat. They don't book maximum wins because they play only premium hands, they're predictable, they can be read and bluffed easily, and it's also easy to get out of their way. But I'm not discussing professional-level play. I'm talking about low-limit recreational games in which you have a bunch of players giving reasonable action and having a good time while some grim-looking vulture swoops down about every 20th hand with monster cards. Sadly, he gets donations from unsophisticated players who don't know they're up against a grindstone.

A wise and revered poker guru once admonished me for this attitude. "Everyone is entitled to play the way he wants," the guru said. "Do not be influenced by the actions of other human beings." The hell with that! Rocks aren't human beings!

I'm not claiming that anyone playing selectively is a rock. You do need certain qualifications. Your looseness index should be flexible, depending on the game, and you should change gears now and then to keep good players from reading you. Even I, on occasion, have been called a rock by oafs who think you have to play every hand to have fun. Everything in life is relative, so let me explain how to identify a real, hard-case rock. He's a rock if:

• He's some old geezer wearing a cap with a tractor logo.

• He has electrodes in his neck.

• His chips have cobwebs on them.

• The only thing he has said in two hours is, "Change the cards."

• His watch just stopped because it's a self-winding watch that depends on movement of the hands.

• He just won a $500 pot and very reluctantly tipped 50 cents.

How does one deal with these boulders? Well, you have a lot more latitude in home games, where you're dealing with people you know. You can be fairly liberal in heaping scorn, abuse, and insults on their heads. Your intention should be to either rattle them or cause them to loosen up in shame, or at least call attention to their antisocial behavior and isolate them like the pariahs they are.

You could start off by consulting a thesaurus for a vocabulary of rock-related words such as pebble, gravel, granite, tombstone, monolith, slate, basalt, petrified, and so on. You could mention the Rocky movies. You could sing a chorus or two of such songs as Rock of Ages, Rockabye Baby, Rocky Mountain High, or Rock Around the Clock. You could call for someone to check his pulse or hold a mirror to his mouth to see if he's still breathing. You could ask, "Has anyone here seen (name of player) lately?" When a player is well ahead in the late stages of a game and has screwed down the hatch, you could allude to his being behind a log or locking it up. Try missing him when you're dealing, and when he screams, "Where are my cards?" innocently reply, "Oh, are you still here?"

But the best way to deal with a rock in a home game (other than throwing him out) is simply to raise the antes to a level where his tight play is no longer profitable.

Dealing with rocks in cardrooms is not as easy. A professional rock is hard to insult. He has skin as thick as a bull elephant. That old guy with the seamed face and gnarled hands has heard every insult known to man and never blinked.

If he's a little twerp, you could try any of the home game insults or ask him if he's playing poker or waiting for a bus. You could call over the floorman and say there's an empty seat in your game. When the floorman says he doesn't see any empty seat, point to the rock. On a safer and more socially acceptable level, you could simply muck your hands if the rock calls, with some mild comment like, "I'm not going to play if he's in." But if you find all of your tactics are for naught, just find another game rather than sit there and be aggravated.

For years anthropologists have been trying to decipher the meaning behind Stonehenge, that mysterious prehistoric circle of rock arrangements in England. I think I know its meaning: It was an early poker player's comment on his tight opponents.