As far as calendars go, you wouldn't think the Babes of Chess would be a hot seller. But when Zhu Chen, the recently crowned women's world chess champion, was approached about modeling as a checkmate playmate, she wasn't surprised. There are, after all, a lot of chess kooks out there, like the Web fanatic who proclaimed her the most beautiful girl grand master, or the letter writer who wondered whether she was the result of a nefarious genetic experiment to create a perfect Chinese woman. "Nature could not give birth to someone like you," read the exclamation point-filled note. "You must be an artificial creation to be blessed with such brains and beauty."

Zhu's popularity can be partially explained by China's current obsession with chess. In just two decades, the number of amateur chess players in the country has increased from a few thousand to more than 5 million. Future chess stars are handpicked by the state and trained alongside wannabe gymnasts and weight lifters at government-run sport schools. When Zhu turned professional at the tender age of 12, she moved from her hometown of Wenzhou to a Beijing athletic academy. Training regimens were brutal. Eight hours of rigorous mind games a day left her so exhausted that she would flop into bed and fall asleep immediately, only to find herself a few minutes later dreaming of chess moves.

But the tough training paid off. In both 1994 and 1996, Zhu won the women's world junior title. Unlike many female chess players who develop a defensive or positional style of play, Zhu relishes the rush of attack. "My coaches told me that there is no reason a woman should play differently than a man," she says. "So I don't play as a woman or a man. I just play as me."

While other countries, particularly in Eastern Europe, give more support to boy chess prodigies, China funds future grand masters of both genders equally. It shows. Before Zhu's breakout win, the country's other top chess heroes, Xie Jun and Qin Kanying, were also women who played with unusual confidence and poise. Zhu's own self-assured style culminated in the December world championships, where the then sixth seed carried out blitz after blitz before finishing off Russia's Alexandra Kosteniuk, taking home $50,000 in the process.

Instead of hitting the Moscow bars in celebration—a longstanding chess-hazing tradition—Zhu shared her victory quietly with her husband Mohamad al-Modiahki, Qatar's first-ever grand master. The unlikely pair met in 1994 at a match in Malaysia. Then, the 18-year-old Zhu could barely speak English, so the pair had to resort to playing out their love on a chessboard. "There are many combinations with the king and the queen that are quite beautiful," says Zhu, with a wink. Against the wishes of both families, the couple married two years ago in China. Neither set of in-laws could comprehend the attraction. For Zhu's parents, marrying a foreigner—and a Muslim at that—was tantamount to treason. And for al-Modiahki's folks, the girl considered a beauty back home was simply a moon-faced infidel. Zhu confronted the parental opposition with characteristic determination. "Nobody could have stopped our marriage," she says, her chin jutting out defiantly.

But if passion brought the pair together, logic has kept them apart. Al-Modiahki's career is tied to Arabia and Zhu's to Asia. Since their marriage, they have only seen each other at chess championships, and Zhu admits that such stolen moments can be distracting. At the December match, Zhu showed up for the final visibly tired, leading chess wags to speculate that she was spending more time attending to her own mate than planning a checkmate.

Whatever the source of her exhaustion, Zhu has begun letting logic prevail in some aspects of her life. Recently, she switched her major at Beijing's Qinghua University from literature to the more prosaic economic management. If she can string moves together on a spreadsheet as well as she plays her pawns, Zhu may soon be switching from the chess board to the boardroom. A career in high finance? That could be a good move.