Despite allegedly not knowing Spanish, a man from New Zealand who was acclaimed as a Scrabble wonder won the Spanish World Scrabble Championships.
As reported by Reuters, Nigel Richards won this year’s tournament in Granada, Spain, last month, demonstrating once more his extraordinary ability to perform better than even native speakers of their tongues.
Second to Richards, Benjamín Olaizola told Spanish radio station La Cadena SER, “This is an incredible humiliation,” referring to his opponent as a “gifted man” with “very specific capabilities.”
The Federación Internacional de Léxico en Español posted on Instagram that Richards, who is in his 50s, had won 22 straight bouts and defeated over 145 opponents from all over the world, including Argentina, Venezuela, Spain, and Colombia.
Richards, who is referred to as the “Tiger Woods of Scrabble,” is ranked #1 by the World English-language Scrabble Player’s Association (WESPA) and has won about 200 events, including several world titles.
His Scrabble skills, however, have long gone beyond the board in his mother tongue.
After winning the French-language title in 2015, Richards became well-known throughout the world, despite supposedly knowing little more than “Bonjour.”
Richards reportedly spent nine weeks learning the French Scrabble vocabulary, which has approximately 400,000 words, according to his friend and long-time supporter Liz Fagerlund, who spoke to CNN at the time.
“He’s probably wired differently; he doesn’t even go through the pages word for word,” Fagerlund told CNN. “He can read a page of words and take in everything that is written.”
Richards and Fagerlund first crossed paths in 1996 when Richards joined the Christchurch Scrabble club in New Zealand.
He began playing Scrabble with his mother when she became tired of him outplaying her at cards. She believed she could win because he struggled with English in school, according to Fagerlund. “He arrived at the club and quickly began beating everyone there.”
Richards seldom ever does interviews. Media portrayals of him include being a loner who enjoys riding a bike and abstaining from alcohol, tobacco, television, and radio.
Runner-up Richards had a knack for employing complicated phrases, even in a foreign language, and a special way of surprising his rivals, according to Olaizola.
“He had the most visible hand—the one you’d get from a computer—and he didn’t use it,” Olaizola told La Cadena SER.
