Joan Rivers to Host Pokery TV Show

Starring Norm Zada, math professor turned porn exec

by , Jul 29, 2009 | 1:20 am

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?,”- 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.


10 Comments to “Joan Rivers to Host Pokery TV Show ”


  1. Trent
    says:

    Really? Why would any poker player want to watch anything hosted by Joan Rivers?


  2. G-Squared
    says:

    The only thing I find on Norm Zada relating to poker is that he won a charity poker tournament.

    http://www.1736familycrisiscenter.org/press_files/press_0707.htm

    Does this qualify him for “championship poker player” status?


  3. BJ Nemeth
    says:

    I’d hardly call this a poker-y TV show. It’s a reality TV show, and one of the episodes happens to be about a guy who plays poker among other things.

    FYI, this show is executive produced by Mark Burnett, who also happens to be the executive producer of “Celebrity Apprentice,” which, you might remember, was won in rather unbelievable fashion by Joan Rivers.


  4. DanM
    says:

    BJ hit it on the head … Am very curious how this plays out, using this rather fascinating character — c’mon, you gotta admit Zada is that — with any Joan Rivers spin.

    Also curious how this guy made $100 million playing poker, which I pretty much don’t believe.

    FWIW, Burnett also does Survivor, I believe, and a few other top-notch reality shows. So basically there are many things I am curious about.


  5. Poker Shrink
    says:

    Not to derail a Joan Rivers thread….. but shouldn’t we all be following a BJ On-the-Road twitterfest by now? I mean BJ and Rhapsody meandering about the country is just more compelling than anything that has Joan Rivers in it and for that matter most of what has poker in it.


  6. Kevin Mathers
    says:

    Maybe he played poker metaphorically.


  7. DanM
    says:

    lol, “fuzzy logic” in play, that much is sure.

    ***I’d hardly call this a poker-y TV show. ***

    BJ, I said poker-y, not poker-ish. uh duh!


  8. Johnny Hughes
    says:

    Every one who has worked advertising will recognize a trade out.

    1. He will supply her a new set of tits.

    2. She will say he won $100 million playing poker.


  9. Anonymous
    says:

    Hi, Norm’s episode of the “How’d You Get So Rich” show aired tonight. I think it said he made $100,000 playing poker for a year, which he then used to start a bunch of stock-market investing that eventually earned him the $100 million. (So the quoted press release at the top of the page had it backwards.)

    PS: For the commenters who had some difficulty finding information about his earlier life, it’s probably because they were looking for Norm Zada — he simplified the spelling of his last name, before which his name was Norm (Norman) Zadeh.


  10. Adsf
    says:

    He got rich by winning the lawsuit against google that’s it