Sophie Milliet

Who is Sophie Milliet?

Sophie Milliet is a French chess player and four times 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 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'Isère and eventually taking second place behind Almira Skripchenko. Due to the strength of this contest, she gained many rating points.

In 2006, she made a foray to the Swiss 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.