SO much for the knights and bishops. The formerly sedate world of international chess is attempting to transform its cerebral image by resorting to what critics are calling “soft pawn”.

Chess has discovered sex, but a bid to promote the physical attractions of some leading women players has sparked an angry debate about the game’s future and whether or not its players should be photographed in bikinis.

A group of international grandmasters including Nigel Short, formerly Britain’s top player, has launched the World Chess Beauty Contest, an internet competition to find so-called “chess chicks” — beautiful women who play competitive chess.

The website has already compiled an impressive list of potential beauty queens, among them Vaness Reid, a model-like Australian teenager, and Maria Manakova, the fourth-ranked Russian woman chess player, who has posed nude in a Moscow magazine.

The site’s founders argue that the game needs glamour to compete with a multi-million-dollar challenge from televised poker, which is believed to be drawing both players and sponsorship from the chess circuit.

Yet several leading women players have complained that they feel degraded by a contest that awards women a rating based on their looks.

Jennifer Shahade, twice a US women’s champion, said: “There is nothing wrong with making chess sexier by highlighting the hip players who participate. But I find the World Chess Beauty Contest misguided and juvenile.

“One of the disturbing aspects of this is that the judges and creators (of the contest) are not anonymous fans but prominent members of the chess community who are very proud of their idea. Would you ever see Tiger Woods bragging about how he started a ‘golf babe’ contest?”

Viviane Broceliande, another player, argued that unlike other sports where women athletes such as Anna Kournikova, the Russian tennis player, routinely capitalise on their sex appeal, chess often involves men and women playing against each other. “When you are trying to ogle photos of women who are in the same competitive realm as you, you are disrespecting them,” she said.

Other women disagreed. Alexandra Kosteniuk, 21, a Russian grandmaster ranked fifth in the world among women, claims to operate the “most visited grandmaster’s website in the world”. A willowy brunette, she sells pictures of herself and a 36-minute video showing her “doing her exercises on Miami beach”.

Arthur Kogan, an Israeli grandmaster who is one of the contest judges, said: “The chess world needs a drastic change, especially women’s chess, to get a chance to make a suitable living out of it.”

But is “soft pawn” really the answer? Manakova recently acknowledged: “We are not as strong as the male players so why shouldn’t we cash in on our beauty?”

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