Camilla Baginskaite

Who is Camilla Baginskaite?

Camilla Baginskaite is an American chess Woman Grandmaster and chess teacher.

She learned chess from her father when she was eight years old, visiting a chess school when she was ten. When she was fifteen years old she became the youngest Lithuanian Women's Chess Champion. In 1986, she was third after Ildikó Mádl and Svetlana Prudnikova at the Under-20 World Junior Chess Championship in Vilnius, her home city. She then went on to win the event the following year in Baguio. For this achievement she received the title Woman International Master. The Championship in 1987 was only her second international tournament and her first outside the Soviet Union.

In 1997 she moved to San Francisco, California. Baginskaite studied design in Lithuania and the U.S.A. with a Master's degree in history of art. She is married to Alex Yermolinsky. They have two children, a boy named Ed, born May 17, 1998 and a girl named Greta,born August 21, 2003. and got to know each other at the Chess Olympiad 1996 in Yerevan.

In the year 2000 she won the U.S. Women's Chess Championship together with Elina Groberman. Since Baginskaite won against Groberman in the tiebreak, she qualified for the Women's World Chess Championship 2001 in Moscow, where she reached the last sixteen. This was, at the time, the best result for a female U.S. chess player since the Championship was founded in 1927. She was defeated by Xu Yuhua in a tiebreak.