OK, I\’m definitely Tivo-ing this one:
The economy is definitely taking a toll on everybody, but unlike many people, Norm Zada took a chance and became a millionaire–by gambling! Norm made $100,000 in one year which he eventually turned into $100 million by playing poker. Watch him talk about his journey on TV Land Prime’s new original series “How’d You Get So Rich?,â€- hosted by gossip diva Joan Rivers- which premieres on August 5th at 10pm. Multi-millionaire Norm is able to live every man’s dream in a lavish 11 bedroom house surrounded by famous neighbors and beautiful women serving as his employees.
WTF? That\’s what MTV (parent network of TV Land) is saying … even though this Norm Zada character has no listing in the Hendon Mob database nor on Pocket 5s. So who is he really?
For one, he is founder of the implant-free porn magazine Perfect 10 (nsfw). He\’s the same guy who sued Google (and won) over their use of thumbnail images from his publication. He\’s also the author of a book, Winning Poker Systems, which was a follow-up to his not-so-heralded paper, \”Theoretical efficiency of the Edmonds-Karp algorithm for computing maximal flows.\”
Prior to poker (and porn), he apparently taught mathematics and computer science at Stanford, Columbia, and UCLA. And then he tried to start money management competitions called the U.S. Trading Championship and the U.S. Investing Championship … essentially the World Series of Finance? In 1996, he supposedly made the claim that balancing the US federal budget would lead to \”economic disaster\” — and offered $400,000 to anyone who could prove him wrong.
Zada, a Ph.D., is the son of famed UC-Berkley mathematician and computer scientist Lofti Zadeh, who received the 2009 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Electrical Engineering for \”inventing and developing the field of \’fuzzy logic,\’ in which a system applies a quantitative assessment to inherently ambiguous ideas, thus providing a new paradigm to improve artificial intelligence and automated control systems.\”
Oh, and he\’s part Iranian.