Nigel Richards, a 57-year-old New Zealand scrabble phenomenon, won the 2024 Spanish-Language Scrabble World Championship despite not speaking the language at all.
Richards became World Champion in 2007, and repeated the feat in 2011, 2013, 2018, and 2019. He is generally regarded as the greatest of all time, but not just in his native tongue.
Back in 2015, he won the 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, but such a feat 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. This time, French.
Last month, Nigel Richards won the 2024 Spanish-Language Scrabble World Championship in Granada, Spain, despite not being able to speak it. 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.
Nobody knows what his next language challenge will be, but clearly English-language Scrabble is not enough to challenge him anymore.
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