Sophie Milliet

Infobox chess player
playername = Sophie Milliet


caption =
birthname = Sophie Milliet
country = FRA
datebirth = birth date and age|1983|11|02
placebirth = Marseille , France
datedeath =
placedeath =
title = Woman Grandmaster
worldchampion =
womensworldchampion =
rating = 2366 (October 2008)
peakrating = 2414 (July 2007)

Sophie Milliet (born November 2, 1983 in Marseille) is a French chess player and a former national women's champion.

She was raised in the French town of Castelnau-le-Lez and learned to play chess at the age of four. Her endeavours at junior level showed good promise and catapulted her Elo rating over the 2100 mark by the time she was seventeen years of age. Consequently, she played top board for the French Girls team at the Faber Cup in Dublin in 2000 and contributed to winning the event.

However, it was at Aix-les-Bains in 2003 that she showed her greatest progress, winning the French Women's Championship with 9/11, an impressive 1½ points clear of the field. The result sealed her qualification for the Woman Grandmaster (WGM) title, awarded the same year. At the 2004 event, she came close to repeating her previous success, for a while leading the competition in Val d'Isere and eventually taking second place behind Almira Skripchenko. Due to the strength of this contest, she gained many rating points. The championship returned to Aix-les-Bains in 2007 and once again, she finished in first place, this time on equal points with Silvia Collas. A rapidplay play-off was used to determine the champion and Milliet narrowly missed out.

In 2006, she made a foray to the Swiss Women's Open Championship in Lenzerheide and placed a creditable third. Competing at the Baku 2007 Women's International she faced a tough test, losing her first 3 games, then resourcefully climbing back to 4/9 in what was a first class line-up. Pia Cramling was just one notable scalp along the way. At Pau in 2008, she claimed a second triumph in the French Women's Championship.

A keen exponent of team chess, she represented France in the Chess Olympiads of 2004 and 2006, notching up a healthy, cumulative plus score of +11, =6, -4. She also participated at the European Team Championships of 2003, 2005 and 2007. As a player of league chess, she is extremely active and has participated in the French Nationale for three teams; "Bischwiller", "Clichy" and latterly, "Montpellier". Between 2003 and 2005 she was a frequent visitor to the German Women's Bundesliga and in respect of the UK's 4NCL, has occasionally appeared for the largely female-populated "Pride and Prejudice" team in 2007/08.

As of July 2008, Sophie Milliet's Elo rating was 2357.

References

*German Wikipedia article - see link under "Languages"
* [http://www.olimpbase.org Olimpbase - Olympiads and other Team event information]
* [http://www.iol.ie/~jghurley/gf2000nw.htm Glorney & Faber Cup, Dublin 2000]

External links

* [http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=50664? Milliet's games at Chessgames.com]
*fide|id=623725|name=Sophie Milliet