In the summer of 2003, ESPN put a sports columnist in front of a microphone for six hours of World Series of Poker coverage. Norman Chad did not play no-limit hold’em at the time. He had been consulting on poker programming for the production company when he was asked to be the color commentator, next to play-by-play man Lon McEachern. That year an amateur named Chris Moneymaker beat Sammy Farha for the title and $2.5 million, and the replays ran on ESPN for months. Many viewers learned the game listening to Chad.
He has been in the booth for almost every Main Event since. In 2026 he called his 24th WSOP, back on ESPN.
A columnist before a commentator
Chad was born in 1958 and grew up in Silver Spring, Maryland, the son of Seymour Chad and Perla Chad, who was born in Cuba. He went to Northwood High School and graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1981. His career began in sports journalism. He worked as a sports columnist at The Washington Post, and for years he wrote Couch Slouch, a syndicated column about watching sports on television, written from the sofa.
The column had its own running gags. Readers sent in questions, and the ones he chose earned them $1.25. For 12 years he also published NFL picks against the spread, chosen by coin flip, and the coin often finished with a winning record. The joke worked because it was close to the truth about tipsters.
Chad also guest-hosted ESPN’s Pardon the Interruption a couple of dozen times, a period that ended badly with his old Washington Post colleague Tony Kornheiser. In a 2022 interview he said the two had not spoken in more than 15 years.
Hired to explain, not to play
What Chad brought to poker television was not expertise in the game. It was timing. Poker on TV had a problem: long stretches of nothing, then a hand that decided everything. ESPN’s coverage in 2003 showed viewers the players’ hole cards, so the audience knew who was ahead. Someone had to fill the gaps and keep a casual sports fan from changing the channel.
Chad filled them with puns, asides and a long-running set of jokes about his ex-wives. He married his college girlfriend in 1984, and that marriage ended in divorce. A second marriage lasted less than a year. He married his third wife, Toni, in 2007. The ex-wife material became such a trademark that when he missed a broadcast, his stand-in was asked about it on air.
McEachern handled the action, the chip counts and the payouts. Chad handled the people. If you watched any WSOP replay in the 2000s, you will recognize the rhythm: a straight read of the hand, then a one-liner from the man on the left.
Through the boom and after it
The years after Moneymaker’s win are usually remembered as the poker boom. Main Event fields grew from 839 players in 2003 to more than 8,000 in 2006, and ESPN coverage expanded with them. Chad and McEachern became the sound of that period, calling the runs of champions such as Greg Raymer in 2004 and Joe Hachem in 2005. Their work on the WSOP is a large part of the modern chapter of poker history, and it carried over to other ESPN properties, including the United States Poker Championship.
In 2020 the pair were nominated together for the Poker Hall of Fame, recognized for their broadcasting work. That same year Chad tested positive for COVID-19 in August and dealt with a long recovery, describing a severe headache, a heavy cough and fatigue. He missed the broadcast of the 2020 Main Event heads-up match between Damian Salas and Joseph Hebert, which aired on ESPN2 at the end of February 2021. Jamie Kerstetter sat in his chair and promised she had prepared plenty of ex-wife jokes of her own.
The coverage changed hands over the following years. The WSOP moved to CBS Sports Network and PokerGO, with much of the Main Event behind a paywall, and Chad and McEachern were confirmed as the CBS commentators in 2021. Chad later said that, with the Main Event largely behind a paywall for five years, it was as if the WSOP had vanished from the mainstream.
The 2025 gap year
In July 2025, with the Main Event under way, poker fans asked a simple question: where were Norman Chad and Lon McEachern? The answer was a voluntary break from live streaming. McEachern called it their gap year. Chad said it might turn into a gap decade for him. They still recorded commentary in post-production for the CBS episodes of the Main Event and produced short clips of notable WSOP hands with GGPoker, and the 2025 final table, won by Michael Mizrachi, went out without them in the live booth.
He also stayed outspoken about the game. In April 2025 he criticized the use of GTO Wizard during play, saying, “Let’s just keep it humans versus humans while we’re at the table.” He keeps his distance from sports betting, too: he has said he quit sports betting in the 1980s after losing $1,500 to $2,000 in a single week, an episode that began with an $800 bet on the Orioles.
Back on ESPN in 2026
The gap year lasted one year.
For the 2026 WSOP, which ran from May 26 to July 15 in Las Vegas, the Main Event returned to ESPN. Live streams ran on the ESPN app, and the three-day final table, played August 3 to 5, aired on ESPN2. Chad and McEachern handled the post-produced shows and the final table, with Ali Nejad and Nick Schulman also part of the commentary team. Chad also joined a daily studio show produced by GGPoker and hosted by Jeff Platt.
He was realistic about what television can do. “We’re not going to get a repeat of the boom we saw 20 years ago,” he said before the series, “but we will get the game in front of a lot of people who wouldn’t see it otherwise.” He also called the ESPN connection “so critical right now to poker’s lifeline.” For a commentator who started with six hours of tape in 2003, the 2026 final table on ESPN2 was a return to the channel where his poker career began.