Attentional deployment towards specific visual items can be regulated through the delivery of rewards, both in the short- and in the long-term. Biases of attention towards specific visual objects have also been reported for stimuli associated to various forms of addiction. In order to assess whether such pathological biases are similar in nature to those artificially induced in normal individuals by the controlled delivery of rewards, we have begun a systematic exploration of attention biases in chronic smokers. To this aim, we have developed a probe paradigm where participants discriminate the orientation of a Landolt C item presented on top of one or the other of two competing images, shown on the two sides of fixation, depicting a smoke-related and a smoke-unrelated object. Forty chronic smokers were recruited for the study. Their performance was compared between conditions with probes appearing over smoke-related vs. smoke-unrelated stimuli. Overall, no consistent biases of attention were found at the group level. However, distinct patterns of attention biases emerged by considering separately male and female participants. Moreover, we found that different personality traits and smoking habits predicted direction and strength of the measured bias. Therefore, it appears that attention biases towards smoke-related items are a variable trait of smoke dependence where gender appears to play a crucial role, along with a number of other factors.