Ed Miller preferred chess to poker while a student at Isidore Newman School. "I didn't even like cards," he said. "My dad kept wanting me to play bridge and I was like, 'Whatever.'"

Now a poker professional residing in Las Vegas, Miller is the culture-and-couture-rehab patient on this week's episode of "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy," scheduled to air at 9 tonight on the Bravo cable network. Miller came to professional gambling by the not-so traditional route: Good family, exclusive private high school, killer college, cutting-edge job for a megabucks company. After Newman, he obtained two degrees at MIT -- in physics and computing -- taught for a year, then took a job at Microsoft. Assigned to the team tasked with developing a Google-like Internet search engine for the software giant, Miller relieved stress by dabbling in online gaming.

Cosmically enough, he got into his first online poker game, at which he lost $100, by clicking on an online ad. Eventually, he began taking long weekends to visit casino poker rooms. Eventually, he quit Microsoft and made his life one long poker weekend. Eventually, with co-authors David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth, he wrote the primer, "Small Stakes Hold 'Em: Winning Big With Expert Play." It was a success. Other poker books have followed. More are coming.

Poker is hot. So is Miller. Miller's personal Web site is www.notedpokerauthority.com, and the "Queer Eye" Fab 5 mission was to clean up Miller a little to make him more marketable.

In tonight's episode, Miller presides over a charity celebrity poker tournament to raise funds for Katrina recovery. Last August, Miller watched the storm's approach on TV from his home in Las Vegas. "I saw the satellite pictures and I actually cried," he said. "I said, 'This is going to destroy the city.' When you're a kid, they always warn you that the big one is coming. I saw it on TV and said, 'This is the big one.' " Both of Miller's parents lost homes in the storm.

"We thought about doing something sooner," said Kyan Douglas, a graduate of Loyola University who went on to become the Fab 5's grooming guru. "What we didn't want to do is jump on the Katrina bandwagon. We thought we'd go down there and make over some homes or something."

Making over a native to preside over a charity card game is a start. "Honestly, anything that you do feels like not enough," said Douglas, a Florida native whose New Orleans years, otherwise happily recalled, ended in tragedy.

Douglas worked at the French Quarter Louisiana Pizza Kitchen at the time of the 1996 tragedy there, when three co-workers were killed by armed robbers. He wasn't on duty that day. "My memories of New Orleans are definitely a mixed bag," he said. "I've only been back to the city twice since I left seven years ago (neither time since the storm). The interesting thing is that about two months before the storm, I was getting strong urges to go to New Orleans, which was catching me off guard, because I honestly haven't had strong urges to go back. I was dreaming about the city, remembering things like sitting in PJ's writing in my journal, the streets and the architecture and my friends and just the whole thing. I was getting so nostalgic for New Orleans and wanting to go back, and you can imagine my schedule is a little bit crazy at times, so it's very easy to put things off. And I did. I put it off and put it off and put if off. But when Katrina hit, I couldn't help but wonder if some part of me connected to the great scheme of things wasn't sort of telling me, 'Go, go, go. It's going to change.'"

As is almost always the case on "Queer Eye," Miller's makeover is just slightly short of astonishing. "Ed is a successful guy, without a doubt, he's really doing well in terms of his own efforts in re-creating himself as a poker expert," Douglas said.

But . . . "I think he lacked a certain flair," Douglas said. "The charm with Ed is also the challenge. He's sort of a nerd."

Admittedly, proudly, successfully so.

On tonight's episode, Miller reveals that his wife was wearing an "I Love Nerds" T-shirt when they first met, proof that advertising pays. "On my Web site I have a photo from my wedding, and I kind of look put-together in the photo," Miller said. "And (friends and fans) see that and say, 'You don't need a makeover.' But when they see me on any day that's not my wedding they say, 'Maybe you do.'"