VANESS REID, a 16-year-old student from Sydney, Australia, runs cross-country, plays touch football, enjoys in-line skating, swims and goes bodyboarding. She also has a cerebral side: she plays competitive chess. She represented Australia at a tournament in Malaysia in 2002 and played in a tournament in New Zealand this year.

While Ms. Reid is clearly no novice at the game, she isn't exactly taking it by storm. She is not on the World Chess Federation's list of the world's 50 top female players. In fact she is ranked 47,694th among both men and women. But Ms. Reid, who has auburn hair, light-blue eyes and a winning smile, is arguably the top player in the world based on a more subjective criterion: her looks. A Web site called World Chess Beauty Contest (www.1wcbc.com) ranks her as the world's most beautiful woman in the game.

The site was started earlier this year by Vladislav Tkachiev, 32, a Kazakh grandmaster who is ranked 83rd in the world, and his brother, Eugeny, 39. The younger Mr. Tkachiev, who appears in photos to be well-built and boyish looking, said they had started the site to raise the profile of the game. "Chess desperately needs some glamour," Mr. Tkachiev said. The brothers are not the only ones trying to inject some glamour, or at least sex appeal, into the game. Alexandra Kosteniuk, 21, a dark-haired, porcelain-skinned Russian grandmaster who is ranked fifth in the world among women and 525th over all, models and uses her Web site to sell photos of herself posing in bikinis next to giant chess pieces.

Maria Manakova, 31, who is the fourth-ranked woman in Russia and who is ranked eighth on the Beauty Contest site, attracted attention last year when she posed nude for Speed, a Russian magazine. She followed it up by posing for Maxim and the Russian edition of Playboy.

The efforts to spice up the game mainly emanate from Eastern Europe, whose players have long dominated the sport and where cheesecake displays are less likely to draw complaints about the exploitation and the objectification of women.

And capitalizing on sex appeal is also not exactly a new idea in competitive sports. Before Ms. Reid, tennis had Anna Kournikova and beach volleyball had Gabrielle Reese and soccer had Mia Hamm.

But chess?

Mr. Tkachiev said that the people who do not play the game have a wrong opinion about chess. "They think that it is only a game for those who are quite inactive and unattractive and aged," he said. "It is simply not true. This is a very democratic game for anyone. There are a lot of attractive people, whether female or male. We decided to show this side of chess."

So the stereotypes are wrong and always have been? Not exactly. "In general there are much more women in chess than before," Mr. Tkachiev said.

Other players agree. Steve Immitt has directed chess tournaments around the United States for more than two decades. In recent years, he said, he has noticed not only that there are more women playing but that they are better and more attractive.

Still, women are vastly outnumbered in tournaments. So their participation can be a distraction, drawing crowds around them, Mr. Immitt said. They can also distract their male opponents, some of whom do fit the stereotype that Mr. Tkachiev disputed. Mr. Immitt recalled a tournament in Daytona Beach, Fla., in which a male player complained that his female opponent was a distraction. Mr. Immitt went to investigate.

"She was distracting," he said. "But there was nothing I could do. It was the beginning of April, right after spring break, and she was dressed appropriately for the time of year. It wasn't anything against the law. I told the guy, 'You are going to have to call upon yourself to overcome the distraction.' He ended up losing the game anyway, but I am not sure that was from being distracted."

One indisputably attractive woman who plays chess is the supermodel Carmen Kass, who was elected president of the Estonian Chess Federation last year and is dating Eric Lobron, a German grandmaster. But if Ms. Kass draws stares, it is not at the playing tables; she does not compete.

That is not the case for Ms. Kosteniuk, 21, however. Many elite players agree that if there is an equivalent of Ms. Kournikova in chess, it is Ms. Kosteniuk. She dislikes the comparison, saying that she works harder at her game than Ms. Kournikova did at tennis and that she has had more success.

Still, the comparisons are inevitable. Like Ms. Kournikova, Ms. Kosteniuk trades on her looks, modeling and selling her bikini-clad image through her Web site. But Ms. Kosteniuk (pronounced KOS-ten-yuke) said she did not think that people treated her less seriously because of it. To the contrary, she said, the photos helped promote the game by showing that women could be both beautiful and smart.

Ms. Kosteniuk has appeared in many magazines, including European editions of Vogue and Marie Claire. And as part of an ad campaign for LG Computers, she appears on billboards in Moscow and St. Petersburg playing chess on a laptop computer. But she said that she was careful about how she dressed when in competition against men. "I don't dress provocatively," she said. "I don't wear perfume."

Her modeling work does not bother Jennifer Shahade, 24, a two-time United States women's champion who has just published a book about her experiences as a woman playing a game dominated by men. Ms. Shahade, who says she is a feminist, said Ms. Kosteniuk was good for chess.

But she said she also regretted that women who play the game were often judged on their looks. If two well-known female players compete on the Internet Chess Club (www.chessclub.com), a popular Web site, she said, "a large percentage of the comments are about how hot the women are."

She was also less than enthusiastic about the chess beauty contest site. "If you are going to emphasize the beauty of women chess players," she said, "at least do it very well. If you look at the site, people won't come away thinking this is very classy."

Nigel Short, 40, an English grandmaster who is ranked 32nd in the world, is an "arbiter" on the chess beauty site. While he could not really define that role, he said the site was meant to be good-natured. On a page with a photo of Ms. Manakova covered in soap taking a bath, Mr. Short wrote: "Lovely bathroom tiles. Where can I buy them?"

Mr. Short also said that the site was meant to help promote women's chess. "How many women can play chess at a high level?" Mr. Short said. "There is precisely one, Judit Polgar. If you want to promote women's chess on its own, then you have to do something like this."

The eighth-ranked player on the site, Ms. Manakova, 31, drew attention but also criticism when she posed nude in the men's magazines. Ms. Manakova said she thought the publicity might help women's chess. And she was emphatic in asserting that she would never try to use her sex appeal in competition.

Has she ever tried to distract a male opponent during a game? "No," she said. "I don't need to distract my opponent or do something. I can do it after the game if I want. During the game I just want to play good chess."