Alexandra Kosteniuk is quite the chess celebrity mostly because she is an internationally ranked chess grandmaster but also of late she’s been getting more press because she happens to both be a grandmaster chess player and is quite beautiful.

Recently, her Chess Grandmaster Alexandra Kosteniuk Official Site has been getting more traffic than in the past because some of the babeblogs have stumbled across her but she is a whole lot more than just a pretty face. Chess aficianados know her from a whole slew of grandmaster titles and she is the current Vice Champion of the World (World Championships in Moscow) and is only the tenth woman in the history of organized chess to receive the Grandmaster (Men) title (FIDE Congress in Calvia (2004)).

On her site, you will find a number of games and logic problems as well as links to her Chess is Cool podcasts. The galleries are quite interesting. In addition to her competition chess playing, she does a lot of outreach work for kids and the like all over the planet.

The image with this post is of her wearing pretty much my favorite outfit from her competition matches. Check out her galleries for action shots . . . by action shots in chess one means folks sitting or standing at tables staring at one another across a board. She does quite a number of simul games (simultaneous chess matches of a grandmaster against a slew of opponents) and has worn this particular outfit (with and without the highly hypnotic skirt) at straight tournament competitions and simuls.

Way back when dinosaurs walked the Earth and I was a kid in high school, I was the champion of the chess club . . . of course, now, I just suck . . . I mean suck a lot . . . I can manage to beat my eleven year-old daughter but just barely and only because she doesn’t know the rules as well and lacks the experience.