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The Man Who Just Won The Spanish World Scrabble Championship Despite Not Speaking The Language
New Zealander Nigel Richards has a long and decorated career in the globally popular board game
The popular board game Scrabble has created fierce competition around the world for decades for those seeking linguistic supremacy. The best players are required to have a masterful command of vocabulary, which is what makes the feat of New Zealander Nigel Richards all the more impressive. He recently won the Spanish World Scrabble Championship despite not speaking Spanish, and it’s not the first such title he’s taken in a language that’s foreign to him.
Richards is a legendary Scrabble player and just won the Spanish World Scrabble Championship in Granada, Spain, in November 2024. What makes his victory all the more remarkable is that he doesn’t speak Spanish, yet he managed to dominate his competition, losing only one match out of the 24 he played on his way to claiming the crown.
In order to prepare for the championship, Richards began studying the Spanish Scrabble vocabulary list a year ago. He never picked up the intricacies of the language but used a photographic memory to recall clusters of words as pictures and thus learn the thousands of words necessary to make him the…
