Man Who Doesn’t Speak Spanish Wins Spanish-Language Scrabble World Championship

By Spooky on December 6th, 2024 Category: News

Nigel Richards, a 57-year-old New Zealand scrabble phenom, recently won the 2024 Spanish-Language Scrabble World Championship despite not speaking the language at all.

It’s been almost a decade since we first wrote about the talented Mr. Nigel Richards; He had just won the 2015 French-Language Scrabble Championship despite being completely unable to have a conversation in French. It was a remarkable feat that made international news headlines at the time. Richards was already known as the world’s best scrabble player and had earned nicknames like ‘the Tiger Woods of Scrabble,’ but this was completely unheard of. A person who didn’t speak French at all had run through the world’s best French-speaking Scrabble players to earn the title of world champion. Some thought it was a fluke, but Nigel has repeated the feat since, and he recently proved he could do it in other languages he didn’t speak.

Photo: Phil Hearing/Unsplash

Last month, Nigel Richards won the 2024 Spanish-Language Scrabble World Championship in Granada, Spain, despite not speaking the language. How did he do it? Well, the same way he won the world championship for French-language Scrabble – by memorizing a remarkable number of Spanish words, without bothering to learn their meaning.

“The challenge was a bit crazy, but he learned French vocabulary in only nine weeks. He’s a fighting machine. To him, words are just combinations of letters. I’m perhaps exaggerating a bit, but he comes up with scrabbled (words with more than seven letters) that others take 10 years to know,” Yves Brenez, vice president of the Belgian Scrabble federation, said about Nigel in 2015.

 

Somehow, Nigel Richards is capable of earning hundreds of thousands of words by heart and then using them effectively against his opponents. According to John Baird, secretary of the Christchurch Scrabble club where Richards played his first game, he “can look at a page and retain the whole thing, it sticks like a photograph. On top of that, he’s obviously got a very good ability to mix up letters and see the word possibilities.”

All we can do now is wonder what language Nigel Richards will tackle next, as English-language Scrabble is not enough to challenge him anymore.