More than 150 competitors representing 20 countries descended on a hotel on the outskirts of Granada last month to battle it out at the Spanish World Scrabble Championships.
Now, weeks after the letter tiles were meticulously placed and the points tallied, news of the tournament’s winner, Nigel Richards, has made waves across Spain, with many scratching their heads over the fact he does not speak Spanish.
“An incredible humiliation” was how one news presenter described it this week, while another report labelled it “the height of absurdity”.
But for those who have tracked the rise of Richards, a Malaysia-based New Zealander hailed as the Tiger Woods of Scrabble, the feat seemed fitting.
“This is someone with very particular, incredible abilities; he’s a gifted guy,” Benjamín Olaizola, who came second to Richards in the Spanish-language tournament, told the broadcaster Cadena Ser. “We are talking about a New Zealander who has won multiple championships in English – at least five of them.”
The Spanish title wasn’t the first time Richards’ Scrabble skills had shattered linguistic barriers: in 2015 he made headlines when he won the francophone world championships without being able to speak or understand French. Instead he reportedly memorised the entire French Scrabble dictionary in nine weeks.
“He doesn’t speak French at all – he just learned the words,” his friend Liz Fagerlund told the New Zealand Herald at the time. “He won’t know what they mean, wouldn’t be able to carry out a conversation in French, I wouldn’t think.”
In 2018 he again won the francophone tournament, casting off any suggestion that his French title had been a one-off.
After nearly three decades of playing Scrabble competitively, Richards is widely viewed as the best player of all time, with some chalking up his skills to his photographic memory and ability to quickly calculate mathematical probabilities. Intensely private and swift to turn down interviews, very little is known about his personal life.
His reclusive nature – along with his decades of Scrabble conquests and coups – have turned him into a legend of sorts for some.
“Just mentioning his name makes me tingle; he’s a phenomenon,” Eric Salvador Tchouyo, a world champion Scrabble player from Cameroon, told Radio France Internationale.
“I often say he would make a good doctoral thesis topic for students in medicine because it’s incomprehensible that someone could have such memory capacity in a language he doesn’t speak.”
Describing Richards, 57, as an “exceptional” person, he noted that whenever Richards turned up at a tournament, the other players knew they were playing for second place at best.
“When Nigel Richards sits at a table, everyone loses their nerves, even the biggest champions,” he said. “Playing against Nigel Richards is like playing against a computer.”
