The Chess Goddess.(Aleksandra Kosteniuk)

Inside the crumbling rooms of Moscow's Central House of Chess, dozens of top players and fans watch in rapt attention as a match unfolds at lightning speed. On one side of the board sits an elderly Russian man, sporting thick glasses and a concentrated grimace. On the other: Aleksandra Kosteniuk, a ravishing, dark-haired 18-year-old wearing a tight black blouse and sleek, flowing pants. Her ponytail swishes back and forth as she slams the timer every few seconds. Kosteniuk's typically aggressive opening gambit--in this case, the "Sicilian defense," where the black pawn tries to control the center of the board--pays off; after dozens of quick moves, she checkmates her opponent. Some of the old-timers in the audience are horrified by the rapid play. But Kosteniuk doesn't care. "A traditional chess match is just too long to watch. It's boring," she says. "I love speed."

Kosteniuk is lending the sport a racy new image--in every respect. A grandmaster at 14, the Russian bombshell--dubbed the "Anna Kournikova of chess," after the comely blond tennis star--is helping to revive the sport that brought the former Soviet Union world renown and respect. One of her specialties is "blitz chess"--games that usually last no more than 10 minutes--and she's been known to fidget when her opponent reacts too slowly. Once she even played a chess exhibition on roller skates, gliding back and forth among the 15 opponents she played simultaneously.

But her major contribution has been to infuse the game with sex appeal. Her Web site, kosteniuk.com, is filled with flirtatious photos of her posing with oversize rooks and bishops. The Swiss watch company Balmain employs her as one of its main models. And Kosteniuk has inspired lots of talk in Internet chess chat rooms--where she has been called a "chess goddess"--and received thousands of e-mails proposing everything from one-on-one matches to marriage. "[All this fanfare] makes chess look more exciting," she says. "History is cyclical and so is chess. We were down and now I think we're coming back up again."

Moscow has a lot of ground to reclaim. When communism collapsed in 1991, so did the esteemed Soviet chess program that produced phenoms like Boris Spassky and Anatoly Karpov. Throughout the 1990s, government support of the game dwindled. Then last fall 10 of Russia's top players--including Karpov and Garry Kasparov--lost to a team of leading players from around the world. Now Russian officials are eager to popularize the game again and win back their former chessboard glory. A key strategy: promoting speedier matches to capture the short attention span of a younger audience. In addition to blitz chess, "fast matches"- -which typically last less than an hour--are increasingly common, in part because they are far more television-friendly than the traditional seven-hour bouts. Tournaments that once lasted a whole year are now being compressed into a few weeks.

That suits Kosteniuk just fine. "It's not like you play for hours and then make a mistake," she says. "Everything is decided quickly." Decisiveness appears to be a family trait; her father, Konstantin, quit his job as an Army officer to train young Aleksandra when she was just 5. By 10 she was already a European girls champion. In 2001 she was named the women's world vice champion; today ...