24/10 Spanish World Scrabble Winner Can't Speak Spanish? Really?

A New Zealand man embarking on his first-ever competitive Scrabble game in Spanish has won the board game's Spanish-language world title — despite not being able to speak the Spanish language. Nigel Richards, a professional player who has racked up five English-language world titles, secured the Spanish world Scrabble championship in Granada, Spain, in November, dropping just one game out of 24. Richards set about 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 wrap his head around why other people can't just do the same thing," she said. "He can scan a block of words together, and once they lodge themselves in his brain as a picture, he can summon them back very easily." Nothing comparable to the New Zealander's achievement had ever cropped up in Spanish Scrabble, said Alejandro Terenzani, a contest organizer. "It was impossible to brush it off negatively; you can only be amazed," Terenzani said. Richards has pulled this off before. In 2015, he emerged as the French-language Scrabble world champion, despite not speaking French. He followed it up by reclaiming the French title in 2018. Richards is hailed in international Scrabble as the greatest player of all time. In 2008, he became the first player ever to hold the world, US, and British titles simultaneously, despite having to strip away 40,000 English words that do not appear in the American Scrabble word list to succeed in the US. Scrabble does not hinge on players knowing the definitions of words, only on identifying valid combinations of letters, but native speakers still hold an edge. Richards steers clear of reporters, but in 2010 his mother, Adrienne Fischer, let on to a New Zealand newspaper that he did not excel at English in school, never enrolled in university, and approached the game with a mathematical mindset rather than a linguistic one. "I don't think he's ever pored over a book, apart from the dictionary," she said.