WELLINGTON, NEW ZEALAND — A New Zealand man playing his first-ever competitive Scrabble game in Spanish, a language he doesn’t speak, has won the board game’s Spanish-language world title.
Nigel Richards, a professional player who holds five English-language world titles, won the Spanish world Scrabble championships in Granada, Spain, in November, losing one game out of 24.
Richards started memorizing the language’s Scrabble word list a year ago, his friend Liz Fagerlund -– a New Zealand Scrabble official -– told The Associated Press.
“He can’t understand why other people can’t just do the same thing,” she said. “He can look at a block of words together, and once they go into his brain as a picture he can just recall that very easily.”
In second place was defending champion Benjamín Olaizola of Argentina, who won 18 of his games.
Nothing like the New Zealander’s feat had ever happened in Spanish Scrabble, said Alejandro Terenzani, a contest organizer.
“It was impossible to react negatively, you can only be amazed,” Terenzani said. “We certainly expected that he would perform well, but it is perhaps true that he surpassed our expectations.”
Richards has done this before. In 2015, he became the French language Scrabble world champion, despite not speaking French, after studying the word list for nine weeks. He took the French title again in 2018.
Recognized in international Scrabble over his three-decade career as the greatest player of all time, Richards’ Spanish language victory was notable even by his standards, other players said.
While compensating for different tile values in English and Spanish Scrabble, Richards also had to contend with thousands of additional seven, eight and nine letter words in the Spanish language -– which demand a different strategy.
Richards in 2008 was the first player ever to hold the world, U.S. and British titles simultaneously, despite having to “forget” 40,000 English words that do not appear in the American Scrabble word list to triumph in the U.S.
His victories are legendary in the Scrabble community, and games analyzed in YouTube videos watched by tens of thousands.
Scrabble does not require players to know the definitions of words, only what combinations of letters are allowed in a country’s version of the game, but native speakers have “a huge leg up,” American Scrabble player Will Anderson said in a video summarizing Richards’ Spanish win.
Richards’ mother, Adrienne Fischer, told a New Zealand newspaper in 2010 that he did not excel at English in school, never attended university and took a mathematical approach to the game rather than a linguistic one.
“I don’t think he’s ever read a book, apart from the dictionary,” she said.
Fagerlund said Richards impressed her when he arrived at his first Scrabble club meeting at age 28. Two years later, in 1997, he cycled 350 kilometers from Christchurch to the city of Dunedin, won the New Zealand title on his first attempt and cycled home again.
At the Spanish event he was shy and modest, organizer Terenzani said, but happily posed for photos and spoke with fans who approached him.
“Although he did so in English, of course,” Terenzani added.
What motivates Richards, who now lives in Malaysia, is a mystery. He never speaks to reporters.
“I get lots of requests from journalists wanting to interview him and he’s not interested,” Fagerlund said. “He doesn’t understand what all the hoo-ha is about.”
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