The player from New Zealand, Nigel Richards, speaks no Spanish and started memorizing the language’s Scrabble word list a year ago. He beat defending champion Benjamín Olaizola of Argentina – who does speak Spanish.
Scrabble is fun but it’s not always the easiest of games. Especially if you happen to be playing in a language that isn’t your mother tongue.
So just imagine what it would be like playing your first-ever competitive Scrabble game in a language you don’t speak at all.
That’s exactly what happened to a man from New Zealand, who played the game in Spanish. And wouldn’t you know it, he won the board game’s Spanish-language world title!
Nigel Richards, a professional player who holds five English-language world titles, didn’t let the language barrier get in his way and won the Spanish world Scrabble championships in Granada, Spain, losing only one game out of 24. In second place was defending champion Benjamín Olaizola of Argentina, who won 18 of his games – and he speaks Spanish just fine.
Richards speaks no Spanish and started memorizing the language’s Scrabble word list a year ago, his friend Liz Fagerlund – a New Zealand Scrabble official – told AP.
“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.”
Indeed, it’s not the first time that Richards has done this. 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. Forced to adjust his gameplay to compensate 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, US 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 US.
His mother, Adrienne Fischer, told a New Zealand newspaper in 2010 that Richards 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.
What motivates Richards, who now lives in Malaysia, is a mystery because 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.”
Regardless of what he thinks, it’s a pretty impressive hoo-ha.
That’s ‘alboroto’ in Spanish. It’s worth 10 points on the Spanish Scrabble board. De nada.
