Henrique Mecking
Brazilian chess player
Henrique Costa Mecking (born 23 January 1952), also known as Mequinho, is a Brazilian chess grandmaster, and was one of the leading players in the world in the 1970s. He was a chess prodigy, drawing comparisons to Bobby Fischer, although he did not achieve the International Grandmaster title until 1972. He won the Interzonals of Petropolis 1973 and Manila 1976. His highest FIDE rating is 2635, achieved in 1977, when he was ranked number four in the world. He became the third-ranked player in the world in 1978, behind only World Champion Anatoly Karpov and Viktor Korchnoi.
He is the first Brazilian to become a grandmaster. Despite winning his first national championship at the age of 13, he played in very few tournaments. He won at Vršac in 1971 and finished third with Robert Byrne (after the co-winners Karpov and Korchnoi) at Hastings in 1971–72. In 1975, he twice shared second place behind Ljubomir Ljubojević, firstly at Las Palmas with Ulf Andersson and Mikhail Tal, and then at Manila with Lev Polugaevsky, Bent Larsen and Helmut Pfleger.
He was considered a contender for the World Championship in the mid-1970s; however, his chess career was interrupted by a serious illness (myasthenia gravis).
“Henrique Mecking” enters the record as brazilian chess player. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Henrique, Mecking and Brazilian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1379826. VIAF identifies the subject as 292140436. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1952, 1972, 1973 and 1976.
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This entry incorporates text from “Henrique Mecking” 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.