WELLINGTON, New Zealand – A New Zealand man who played his first competitive Scrabble game in Spanish, a language he does not speak, has won the board game’s Spanish-language world title – despite the language barrier that kept him from chatting with his Opponents had stopped him from doing so.
Nigel Richards, a professional player with five English-language world titles, won the Spanish World Scrabble Championship in Granada, Spain, in November, losing only one game out of 24. Richards does not speak any Spanish and has begun memorizing the language’s Scrabble word lists. A year earlier, 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 thing,” she said. “He can see a group of words together and once they go into his brain as a picture he can remember them very easily.”
In second place was defending champion Benjamin Olaizola of Argentina, who won 18 of his games – and speaks Spanish.
Richards has done this before also.
In 2015, he became the French language Scrabble world champion, despite not speaking French, after studying the word list for nine weeks.
He won the French title again in 2018.
Richards, recognized as the all-time great player in international Scrabble during his three-decade career, his victory in Spanish was remarkable even by his standards, other players said.
Forced to adjust his gameplay 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 would have demanded a different strategy. Are.
But what challenge remains for a player who has dominated the game in his mother tongue?
In 2008 Richards was the first player to hold the World, US and British titles simultaneously – to win in the US he had to “forget” 40,000 English words, which are not included in the American Scrabble word list.
His wins are well known in the Scrabble community and his analysis of games in YouTube videos have been viewed by thousands.
Scrabble does not require players to know the definitions of words, with only combinations of letters allowed in a country’s version of the game, but native speakers “have a big leg up”, American Scrabble player Will Anderson said in a video. Summarizing Richards said. Spain wins.
His mother Adrienne Fisher told a New Zealand newspaper in 2010 that Richards did not excel in English at school, never went to university and took a mathematical rather than a linguistic approach to the game.
He said, “I don’t think he ever read a book except a dictionary.”
Fagerlund said that when Richards arrived at his first Scrabble club meeting in Christchurch, New Zealand at the age of 28, he impressed him.
Two years later, in 1997, he cycled 220 miles (350 kilometres) from Christchurch to the city of Dunedin, winning the New Zealand title on his first attempt and cycling home again.
What motivates Richards, who now lives in Malaysia, is a mystery because he never speaks to journalists.
Fagerlund said, “I get a lot of requests from journalists wanting to interview him and he’s not interested.” “He doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about.”
