Ali Nejad transferred from playing poker to being a poker media personality, and lately he can be seen more and more in the mainstream media aswell.
Iranian poker personality Ali Nejad has dreamt about a TV career from a young age, his first job in the industry was at a small San Francisco TV channel. Nejad attended UC Berkeley at the time and has been a winning recreational player for yeras. When he flunked out university he decided to try his luck at professional poker. First he worked as a dealer and then he started to play professionally, he managed to reach the online high stakes cash games, this is when he started to get more involved in the poker media.
In 2003 Nejad competed in the PartyPoker Million Cruise where he met fellow Iranian poker enthusiast and producer Mori Eskandani. At the time, Eskandani worked on FSN Poker Superstars, and later moved on to the best televised poker shows in history, such as High Stakes Poker, National Heads-Up Poker Championship and Poker After Dark.
Eskandani hired Nejad for Poker Superstars 2004 and they have worked together on countless projects since.
In 2008 Nejad became the host of the Poker Road Radio podcast, and was one of the first media personalities to see the opportunity in Twitter, he currently has more than 906,000 followers.
In 2013 Nejad filmed a pilot titled "The Tweet Life", which was rejected at first, but at the beginning of 2014 (when he was the host of the WPT Alpha8) CNN Headline News told him they are interested in the premise of the show because they want to focus more on their social media presence.
CNN Headline News has rebranded to HLN and Nejad’s show was bought and not much later he also became the host of The Daily Share.
On February 24, 2015 the first episode of "The Tweet Life" was released which was retitled as "The Social Life". Nejad is now considered one of the most important members of the HLN team and many believe he could become a known figure in the mainstream media aswell.
Check out the trailer for "The Social Life" below:
