Like all chess players, senior Anna Levina plays with a quiet intensity, head bowed over the board in the deepest thought. But somehow, Anna, a widely known and respected Woman FIDE (Fédération Internationale des Échecs) Master, seems even more serious. Every player earns the respect of her intense concentration.

Anna isn't too quick on the draw, as she readily admits. She plays deliberately, eschewing the "speed chess" that has become popular in recent years. "It's just a contest to see who has the fastest hand," she says.

It took her six hours to grind out a tie in the U.S. Chess Championship game in Las Vegas in 2003, with just eight seconds left on the clock. But Anna, who spends hours poring over problems and classic games before big tournaments and has worked for years on perfecting her game, proves that slow and steady wins the race. At the recent Ithaca Invitational Tournament, she entered as the lowest-ranked player but ended up winning all her games.

Growing up in the former U.S.S.R., Anna took part in a world of chess where the game existed roughly on the same pedestal the United States affords to football. Things were quite different, she found, when she moved to Syracuse, New York, at age ten. The U.S. offered more tournaments, but without the same attendant sense of glory. Anna trained with her father, also a competitive player, while her mother approved reluctantly at first, preferring that her daughter study ballet. But the temptations of the game eventually won out. "They (the chess pieces) were just like toy soldiers to me," she says. "I saw my father play, and I started playing by myself."

Duke first seriously crossed Anna's radar screen when she was a junior in high school, after she read an article in Chess Life detailing the chess team's surprising tie with the team from the University of Texas at Dallas, a perennial powerhouse. Anna was considering a career in medicine, and Duke's prowess in the sciences impressed her further.

As a freshman, Anna was the only woman on Duke's chess team. In a sport historically dominated by men, she has struggled at times to gain the respect of her male competitors. The American Chess Federation took over administration of the U.S. Chess Championship in 2000 and combined the separate tournaments for men and women into a single contest. The move meant that women were directly competing with men for the first time.

Like any competitor, Anna has superstitions. There's the little statuette of Merlin she used to tote along to matches and the lucky suit she wore for her first U.S. Championship. She refuses to change pens to score a game after a win and says that changing clothes between games can also bring bad luck. "What would chess be without superstition?" she asks, smiling.