Viktorija Čmilytė

Country	Lithuania
Born	6 August 1983 Šiauliai, Lithuanian SSR, Soviet Union
Title	Grandmaster Woman Grandmaster
Peak rating	2534 (April 2015)

Viktorija Čmilytė (born 6 August 1983 in Šiauliai) is a Lithuanian chess Grandmaster (GM), European Women's Champion in 2011 and two-time absolute national champion. In 2015 she got a seat in the Lithuanian parliament.

Chess career

Čmilytė started playing chess at the age of six, having been taught the moves by her father. He remained her coach during the formative years. She won the European Under-12 Girls Championship in 1993 and the World Under-12 Girls Championship in 1995.

In 2000, Čmilytė, at the age of sixteen, won both the women's and absolute national championships of Lithuania, held in Vilnius, by beating in the latter three grandmasters and an International Master in a tie-break contest. She won the absolute championship again in 2005 in her home city, this time defeating GM Šarūnas Šulskis in the play-off.

She finished second behind Jovanka Houska in the 2000 European Junior (Under-20) Girls Championship in Asturias. By 2001, she was ranked number one by FIDE amongst girls. In the same year she won the Corus Reserve Group tournament at Wijk aan Zee.

Čmilytė won the silver medal at the Women's European Individual Chess Championship in 2003 (Istanbul), 2008 (Plovdiv) and 2010 (Rijeka). She became European Women's Rapid Chess Champion in 2007. She was awarded the GM title in 2010, having gained the grandmaster norms in the 2008 Gibraltar Chess Festival, 2009 European Team Chess Championship and 2010 European Women's Championship.

Čmilytė competed in the Women's World Chess Championship for the first time in 2000, when she made it to the third round. In 2004 she was defeated in the quartefinals by former Women's World Champion Maia Chiburdanidze. In 2006, Čmilytė reached the semifinals and lost to the eventual runner-up Alisa Galliamova. In 2008 and 2010 she was eliminated in the second round, while in 2010 and 2015 she went out in round three.

Team competitions

Čmilytė has played for the Lithuanian team in the 2010 Chess Olympiad and in seven Women's Chess Olympiads (1996, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006, 2008, 2012), where she won two individual gold medals on board one, the first at Istanbul in 2000 (9½/12) and the second at Calvià in 2004 (8½/11). She earned a place in the team for the first time when she was thirteen (in Yerevan, 1996) and was first board at fifteen (Elista, 1998), contributing a plus score each time.

In the Frauenbundesliga (Women's Bundesliga) in Germany, she is a team member of OSC Baden Baden, but has also played some league chess in Sweden.

Personal life

By way of hobbies, she enjoys sports, such as volleyball. She speaks Russian, English and Spanish in addition to her native Lithuanian.

Čmilytė was married to GM Alexei Shirov from August 2001 to early 2007. On 28 December 2013 Čmilytė married Danish Grandmaster Peter Heine Nielsen. She has three sons, Dmitrij, Alexander and Marius.