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Nigel Richards, from New Zealand, played his first ever competitive Scrabble game in Spanish and won the title. Richards, a professional player with five English-language world titles, triumphed in the Spanish World Scrabble Championships held in Granada, Spain, in November, losing just one match out of 24.
Richards started memorizing the Spanish Scrabble dictionary a year ago, his friend Liz Fagerlund — a New Zealand Scrabble official — told The Associated Press. “He can’t understand why other people can’t just do the same,” she said. ‘He can look at a block of words together and once they form a picture in his brain, he can remember it very easily. “
Argentina’s Benjamín Olaizola, the defending champion, finished in second place, winning 18 of his matches. Richards’ feat had never happened before in Spanish Scrabble, said Alejandro Terenzani, a competition organizer. “It was impossible to react negatively, you can only be surprised,” said Terenzani. “We certainly expected him to perform well, but he may have exceeded our expectations.”
Richards previously became French Scrabble world champion in 2015 and 2018, despite not speaking French. In 2008, he became the first player to hold the world, American and British titles simultaneously.
In Spanish Scrabble, Richards had to compensate for different tile values and contend with thousands of extra words of seven, eight and nine letters, which required a different strategy. Although Scrabble doesn’t require players to know the definitions of words, Richards’ mathematical approach to the game gives him an edge.
Richards’ victories are legendary in the Scrabble community, with games analyzed in YouTube videos watched by tens of thousands of people. His mother, Adrienne Fischer, said in a 2010 interview that he never excelled in English at school, never went to college and approached the game mathematically rather than linguistically.
Fagerlund recalled being impressed when Richards attended a Scrabble club meeting for the first time at age 28. Two years later, in 1997, he cycled 350 kilometers from Christchurch to Dunedin, won the New Zealand title on his first attempt and cycled home again.
At the Spanish event, Richards was shy and modest, but happily posed for photos and spoke to fans who approached him — although he did so in English, Terenzani added.
What motivates Richards, who now lives in Malaysia, remains a mystery. He never speaks to reporters. “I get a lot of requests from journalists wanting to interview him, but he’s not interested,” Fagerlund said. “He doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about.”
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