Chess is cool

Who wouldn’t fall in love with GM Alexandra Kosteniuk, the reigning women’s world chess champion?

Beauty and brain rolled into one.

Knowing that she has a heart to popularize chess among young people makes her more loveable.

Did you know that she has a strategy on how to transform chess into a popular sport especially among the youth?

Read this:

Kosteniuk is not averse to striking a glamorous pose for the cameras, sometimes while dressed in little more than a bikini. Her purpose, she says, is to illustrate her mantra, “Beauty and brains can go together.”

Indeed, she considers her glamour and youth – she is now 24 – powerful tools in her mission to enthuse more young people about the game and persuade them to believe that “chess is cool.”

“Chess has a very wrong image. People think it’s boring, and only fat men in suits play it, so I break that signal and show them chess is cool,” she says.

“You can easily be beautiful and play chess well, or be a professor, or any kind of high achiever. The only thing chess doesn’t have is a lot of attention from the media and from sponsors, so I think I can help in this way. If you tell people there are some nice models playing chess, somehow the modern world finds it more interesting.”

Source: csmonitor