“I am from Vilnius, currently working in Germany, 42 years old, senior IT developer. Married, one son :) My hobbies are board games, sports and literature.”

Ever since Dmitrijus won a highly competitive chess tournament with classic time limits in Mönchengladbach in June 2025, he has become a familiar face on the North Rhine-Westphalia chess scene. However, he is not getting too excited, as he was luckily not matched against any of the four grandmasters in the seven-round tournament organised by the Reydter Chess Club.
On the website of the Lithuanian Correspondence Chess Federation, he reported in 2011 how he got into chess and correspondence chess:

“I started playing chess relatively late, at the age of 12. My father and I were at a sports festival in Vingis Park, where I saw children playing with a giant chessboard (it was 4 x 4 meters!), and I became fascinated with this interesting game. In September, I started attending the Vilnius Chess and Checkers Sports School. My first coach was Pavelas Rubinas (who currently has the highest rating among all Lithuanian chess players in correspondence chess). Later, for about a year, I learned the secrets of chess from Donatas Lapienis. In 2005, Virginijus Grabliauskas suggested that we play by correspondence, and I have been playing ever since.

I achieved my first international correspondence chess master norm in the selection for the 17th World Correspondence Chess Olympiad (2006-2008). I played on board 6 (out of the same number of possible boards), and at that time my rating was still quite low, which is probably why my opponents played a little relaxed and I managed to punish them for it. I scored 7.5 points out of 11, which was enough to achieve the international master norm. Unfortunately, the Lithuanian team did not make it to the final.”¹

While he had to wait until 2011 to get the IM title in correspondence chess, FIDE awarded him the FM title already in 2007. He achieved his first GM norm in correspondence chess in 2017 in a memorial tournament in honour of his late coach Donatas Lapienis (1936–2014), who, incidentally, had topped the ICCF rating list in 1989 with 2715 due to his earlier achievements.

In 2023, at a time when it is hardly possible to achieve a GM norm by normal means due to the ‘death of draws’ in correspondence chess, he had the dubious fortune of participating in a category 12 tournament (Memorial M. Avotins) in which GM norms rained down because one player stopped playing in the middle of the tournament and all his games were counted as losses. The nonetheless well-deserved GM title was awarded to him by the ICCF in 2024.

Dmitrijus Chocenka has been Secretary General of the Lithuanian Correspondence Chess Federation since 2009.

1 http://www.iccf-webchess.com/EventCrossTable.aspx?id=1170