Jeff Haney gets some of poker’s best players to offer their assessments of the 2006 World Series of Poker champion

Friday, Aug. 18, 2006 | 9:10 a.m.

After he was ousted from the World Series of Poker, forced to settle for an eighth-place payday of $1.9 million, Erik Friberg was asked how eventual champion Jamie Gold would fare in a high-stakes cash poker game rather than a tournament.

Friberg didn't mince words.

"I don't think he would have a chance in a big cash game against the best players," Friberg said.

We just might find out.

Gold has been issued an invitation by cable network GSN to compete in the next go-round of "High Stakes Poker," the TV show that portrays an old-fashioned no-limit Texas hold 'em cash game and requires each player to bring at least $100,000 to the table.

Officials with GSN (Cox Cable channel 344) are waiting for RSVPs from Gold and several other players who found instant fame by navigating their way to the final table of poker's most prestigious event last week at the Rio.

The third season of "High Stakes Poker" - which has developed a strong following among fans as well as some top-level professional players - is scheduled to tape in October at a site to be determined. Round 1 was conducted at the Golden Nugget last year, and Season 2 was filmed at the Palms.

Gold, of Malibu, Calif., built a commanding chip lead and bullied his opponents into submission to score a dominating victory and win the tournament's $12 million grand prize in the 37th edition of the World Series.

"You have to get lucky in a tournament to get that many chips," said Friberg, a young Internet poker pro who has the brashness requisite to his chosen profession in, well, spades.

"But he's OK," Friberg added, in a valiant attempt at diplomacy.

It would be intriguing to see how the ultra-aggressive style Gold employed at the final table translates to a cash game, where the antes and forced bets are relatively small compared with the sometimes mountainous piles of poker chips on the felt.

Gold's action-oriented image - poker kids these days call it "laggy," a derivation of "Loose and Aggressive" - worked in his favor when he eliminated Texan Richard Lee in sixth place at the World Series. Gold, holding pocket queens, manipulated Lee into committing all of his chips to the pot with pocket jacks.

"Jamie was raising a lot of pots," Lee said. "I was watching him pretty closely. I didn't think he had a giant hand ... (maybe) ace-king or 10s. I made the decision to come back over the top of him (with a re-raise) and (try to) win it right there."

Lee might not have made such a move in a cash game like the one chronicled by "High Stakes Poker." In contrast to a cash game, where patience is a poker virtue, the stakes increase at regular intervals in a tournament. That serves to accelerate the action, forcing players to make excruciating decisions for all of their chips - or "put their tournament life on the line," as the lingo has it.

"When you're gambling at this level, you don't get millions of chances," Lee said.

Rhett Butler of Rockville, Md., who finished fifth at the World Series, lamented the fact that he went "card dead" at the final table, catching a load of garbage while all of the pretty picture cards turned to Gold.

"If I had half the hands (Gold) had, I'd be smiling, too," Butler said. "He plays a style that is very difficult to read. He gets cards ... but he forces people to make plays."

Once Gold established his monstrous chip lead, drawing more than one comparison to Secretariat, he did indeed begin moving like a tremendous machine, wielding his stack with precision and keeping his opponents perpetually on the defensive.

"He's like a vacuum cleaner, picking up pots that no one else wants," third-place finisher Michael Binger said. "He made a lot of big hands, and he got paid off on them, too. So you've got to give him credit for that. ...

"He had the biggest chip lead in (World Series) history. To do that, you have to be lucky and good."

Should he accept GSN's oh-so-gracious invitation, and thereby risk the specter of watching his hard-earned winnings vanish into the collective maw of poker's most notorious cash-game sharks, Gold would undoubtedly, at some point, run up against Las Vegas pro Daniel Negreanu.

Negreanu - who exudes such cool confidence in his game that he recently took to filming online "video blog" entries from his bed (yes, his bed) - has emerged as perhaps the main attraction of "High Stakes Poker," chatting it up and tossing around with impunity not only chips but tightly bound bricks of actual U.S. currency.

Even Gold himself would make Negreanu a prohibitive favorite if that head-to-head encounter came to pass.

Gold and Negreanu found themselves at the same table in the early going of the World Series. To hear Gold tell it, if the vagaries of the tournament's seating assignments hadn't subsequently flung them in separate directions, there might have been a different World Series of Poker champion.

"I happened to get a good read on everyone at every table I played - except Daniel Negreanu," Gold said. "He's amazing. I could never figure out what he was doing.

"Thank God he wasn't at my final table."