WELLINGTON, New Zealand — A New Zealand man who played his first competitive game of Scrabble in Spanish, a language he does not speak, has won the board game’s Spanish-language world title — despite the language barrier that stopped him from talking to his opponents.
Nigel Richards, a professional player who holds five English-language world titles, won the Spanish Scrabble World Championship in Granada, Spain, in November, losing just one game out of 24. Richards does not speak Spanish and began to memorize the Scrabble language list of words 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 do the same,” she said. “He can look at a block of words together and once they go into his brain as a picture, he can just remember it very easily.”
In second place was defending champion BenjamÃn Olaizola of Argentina, who won 18 of his matches – and speaks Spanish.
Richards has done this before.
In 2015, he became the French 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 during his three-decade career as the best player of all time, Richards’ victory in the Spanish language was remarkable even by his standards, other players said.
Forced to adjust his game to compensate for the 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 require a different strategy.
But what challenge remains for a player who has dominated the game in his native language?
Richards in 2008 was the first player ever to hold the world, US and British titles at the same time – despite having to “forget” 40,000 English words that do not appear on the American Scrabble word list to triumph in the US.
His wins are legendary in the Scrabble community and his games analyzed in YouTube videos viewed by tens of thousands.
Scrabble doesn’t require players to know word definitions, only those letter combinations allowed in a country’s version of the game, but native speakers have “a big leg up,” American Scrabble player Will Anderson said in the. a video summarizing Richards’ Spanish win.
His mother, Adrienne Fischer, told a New Zealand newspaper in 2010 that Richards did not excel in English at 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 except the dictionary,” she said.
Fagerlund said Richards impressed him when he arrived at his first Scrabble club meeting in Christchurch, New Zealand, at the age of 28.
Two years later, in 1997, he cycled 220 miles (350 kilometers) from Christchurch to the city of Dunedin, won the New Zealand title at his first attempt and cycled home again.
What motivates Richards, who now lives in Malaysia, is a mystery because he never speaks to reporters.
“I get a lot of requests from reporters who want 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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