In an extraordinary display of skill, New Zealand Scrabble legend Nigel Richards has claimed the Spanish World Scrabble Championship—without knowing a word of Spanish. The tournament, held in Granada, Spain, saw Richards defeat more than 150 seasoned competitors, including defending champion Benjamín Olaizola from Argentina.
While most players relied on their linguistic expertise, Richards approached the game with his unmatched memory and mathematical precision, memorizing thousands of words from the Spanish Scrabble dictionary. Impressively, he lost only one game out of 24 in his Spanish-language tournament debut.
Richards, often hailed as the “Tiger Woods of Scrabble,” has a history of defying language barriers. In 2015, he stunned the world by winning the French-language Scrabble title despite not speaking French—an achievement he repeated in 2018. For him, it’s not about understanding the words; it’s about recognizing their patterns.
“He just absorbs the words as images,” said Liz Fagerlund, a New Zealand Scrabble official and friend of Richards. “Once they’re in his brain, he can recall them with ease. He doesn’t see why others can’t do the same.”
Richards’ mastery of Scrabble comes from his photographic memory and ability to calculate letter probabilities on the fly. In his decades-long career, he has won multiple English-language championships and remains one of the most formidable players the game has ever seen.
The Challenge of Spanish Scrabble
Spanish Scrabble adds another layer of difficulty compared to its English counterpart. With thousands of seven, eight, and nine-letter words and adjusted tile values, even experienced players struggle to adapt. Yet, for Richards, it was just another puzzle to solve.
His win has left many in awe, with some calling his achievements “inhuman.” Cameroonian Scrabble champion Eric Salvador Tchouyo summed it up perfectly:
“Playing against Nigel Richards is like playing against a computer. Everyone knows they’re playing for second place.”
While his victories make waves worldwide, Richards himself remains an enigma. He avoids media attention and keeps his motivations a mystery, content to dominate one Scrabble championship after another.
As news of his latest win spreads, one thing is clear—language is no barrier for Nigel Richards when it comes to Scrabble.
