Viktorija Čmilytė (born on August 6, 1983 in Šiauliai) is a
Lithuanian chess player with the titles of Woman Grandmaster (WGM) and
Grandmaster (GM). She recently won the gold medal at the Women's European
Individual Chess Championship in 2011 (Tbilisi).
She is a former two-time national champion.
She started
playing chess at the age of six, having been taught the moves by her father.
She collected many important junior titles, including European Youth Champion
for Girls (under 10) (Szombathely
1993) and World Youth Champion for Girls (under 12) (São Lourenço 1995).
On reaching
age sixteen, she moved outside the sphere of junior chess, winning the full
national championship of Lithuania,
held in Vilnius.
In order to do so, she had to overcome three male grandmasters and an IM in a
tie-break contest, a feat that she repeated five years later in 2005, this time
outgunning GM Šarūnas Šulskis in the play-off.
Čmilytė has
also enjoyed considerable success at the Women's European Individual Chess
Championship, where she captured silver medals in 2003 (Istanbul),
2008 (Plovdiv), and 2010 (Rijeka).
At the
Women's World Chess Championship, she has been a serious contender on two
occasions. On the first occasion, in 2004, she was defeated in the latter
stages by former world champion Maia Chiburdanidze. In 2006, Čmilytė went a
step further, eliminating first her Russian rival Alexandra Kosteniuk, then
beating Chiburdanidze in the quarter-final. However, she lost in the semi-final
to Alisa Galliamova.
In team
chess, she has represented Lithuania
at most of the major events and is an Olympiad double gold medal winner.
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