Baginskate was born in
Vilnius. Her mother is the painter
Gintautėlė Laimutė Baginskienė and her father is the architect and professor
Tadas Baginskas, from whom she learned chess at eight years old, visiting a chess school when she was ten. At the age of fifteen, in 1982, Baginskate became second at women's chess championship of the Lithuanian Soviet Socialist Republic, behind
Esther Epstein. In 1986, she was third after
Ildikó Mádl and
Svetlana Prudnikova at the
World Junior Girls 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 (WIM). The championship in 1987 was only her second international tournament and her first outside the Soviet Union. She won the
Lithuanian Women's Chess Championship in
Panevėžys in 1992. In 1997 she moved to
San Francisco, US. Baginskaite studied design in Lithuania and the US with a master's degree in history of art. She was
married to
Alex Yermolinsky. They have two children, a son and a daughter, In 2000 she won the
U.S. Women's Chess Championship jointly with
Elina Groberman. Since Baginskaite won against Groberman in the playoff by 2-0, 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. Baginskaite competed in the
Women's World Championship also in
2010 and
2015. In 2019, Baginskaite switched her national federation back to Lithuania. She won her second Women's
Lithuanian Chess Championship in 2020, 28 years after her first in 1992. In 2025 she won silver medal in Women's Lithuanian Chess Championship. == References ==