Helgi Grétarsson
Icelandic chess player
Helgi Áss Grétarsson (born 18 February 1977) is an Icelandic chess grandmaster (GM). In 1994 he won the under-20 World Junior Chess Championship. One year prior to that, he played as a goalkeeper for the Icelandic national soccer team in the 1993 UEFA European Under-16 Championship. Helgi graduated in 2005 with a law degree. In 2018, he became Icelandic Chess Champion for the first time. In April 2024, Helgi became the Icelandic Chess Champion for the second time. Since 2022 Helgi has been a deputy member of Reykjavík City Council.
Chess career
Helgi was very successful in international youth tournaments, for example he got a silver medal in the World U-14 chess championships in Warsaw 1991 and he repeated that feat in the World U-16 chess championship in Bratislava 1993. By winning the World Junior Chess Championship (U-20), held in the Brazilian municipality Matinhos 3–15 September 1994, Helgi automatically became a GM. Hence, Helgi directly went from being a FIDE-master to a GM.
From 1 January 1995 until the summer of 1999 Helgi's FIDE rating changed little, ranging from 2440 to 2480. Nevertheless, during this period he had some notable tournament's successes, for example he tied for first place in 1997 at the open international tournament Politiken Cup in Copenhagen and in December that same year he competed in the FIDE World Chess Championship in Groningen where he knocked out Miguel Illescas in the first round, then in round 2 he was eliminated from the competition after losing to Artur Yusupov.
“Helgi Grétarsson” enters the record as icelandic chess player. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Helgi, Grétarsson and Icelandic can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q913136. VIAF identifies the subject as 140966621. The Library of Congress control number is n2010071869. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1977, 1994, 1993 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Helgi Grétarsson” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.