Unit­ed States Grand­mas­ter Gen­nady Sagalchik and his two chess play­ing daugh­ters Car­o­line and Michelle are among the lat­est en­tries in­to the Caribbean Chess Car­ni­val which comes off at the Queen's Park Oval, Port-of-Spain, from Au­gust 3 to 8. With a ELO rat­ing of 2437, Sagalchik tops the list of four mas­ters en­tered so far in the nine-round tour­na­ment, IMs Rafael Pras­ca Sosa (2415) of Venezuela, Kevin Den­ny and Ter­ry Far­ley of Bar­ba­dos and Oladapo Adu of Nige­ria. Sagalchik, born in Min­sk, cap­i­tal of Byelorus­sia in the for­mer So­vi­et Union, is the prod­uct of the most pres­ti­gious Russ­ian chess schools. By age 16, he be­gan win­ning in­ter­na­tion­al tour­na­ments.

Af­ter mi­grat­ing to the US in 1991, he con­tin­ued to ad­vance up the ranks of chess ex­perts. A grad­u­ate of the Bor­ough of Man­hat­tan Com­mu­ni­ty Col­lege and Brook­lyn Col­lege, Sagalchik's goal is to pop­u­larise chess in the US and to help in­tro­duce the sport in­to the school cur­ricu­lum at all lev­els. The Sagalchiks who live in New York are a promi­nent chess-play­ing fam­i­ly. Car­o­line and Michelle learned to play the game at a young age from their par­ents. Ol­ga, their moth­er, a top fe­male play­er in the US, al­so coached her daugh­ters at their el­e­men­tary school chess club. The girls have helped their school team win sev­er­al lo­cal com­pe­ti­tions.

Af­ter a pe­ri­od of aca­d­e­m­ic study, they re­cent­ly re­turned to tour­na­ment chess with in­ter­na­tion­al com­pe­ti­tions in Cu­ra­cao and Cos­ta Ri­ca. To­geth­er with their par­ents they won the top fam­i­ly prize at the Am­a­teur Team East, one of the most pop­u­lar chess fes­ti­vals in Amer­i­ca. Car­o­line is now a stu­dent at the Ivy League Brown Uni­ver­si­ty, while Michelle is a se­nior at Stuyvesant High School in New York City. They both cred­it their aca­d­e­m­ic suc­cess the men­tal ben­e­fits of play­ing chess. Apart from the chess mas­ters, The Caribbean Chess Car­ni­val, a nine-round Swiss, has at­tract­ed a large num­ber of lead­ing play­ers from across the re­gion to­geth­er with a cross sec­tion of lo­cal en­thu­si­asts in­clud­ing FMs Ryan Harp­er, Mario Mer­ritt and Michael Pouchet.

Now in its eighth year, the pop­u­lar an­nu­al tour­na­ment breaks new ground by in­tro­duc­ing two new cat­e­gories, Ju­nior Novices and Adult Novices. Ac­cord­ing to Edi­son Raphael, pres­i­dent of the T&T Chess Foun­da­tion, these new sec­tions will "pro­vide com­pet­i­tive op­por­tu­ni­ties for all T&T chess play­ers, re­gard­less of their play­ing strength and ex­pe­ri­ence." "All cit­i­zens, once you can play the game, are wel­come to par­tic­i­pate in these two new cat­e­gories."