Nigel Richardsfrom New Zealand and considered one of the most skilled Scrabble players in the world, has accomplished an incredible feat: ha won the Spanish-language Scrabble championship in Granada without knowing the language.
His career in the world of Scrabble is extraordinary, with a series of victories that include four world titles in English between 2007 and 2018. However, he has also been able to achieve impressive successes in versions of the game in languages he doesn’t speak at all, such as French and now Spanish.
Since 2015, Richards has competed and triumphed in Scrabble championships in France, demonstrating his exceptional ability to memorize words without knowing the meaning. The key to his success lies, in fact, in his prodigious memory: before each competition, study the dictionary of Scrabble words thoroughly in the target language, without worrying about understanding its meaning. This technique allowed him to quickly memorize the vocabulary needed to compete at the highest levels.
Excels in the discipline of “Duplicate Scrabble”
The discipline in which Richards excels, called “Duplicate Scrabble”, places the participants in front of a particularly demanding challenge. In this variant, each player competes independently, but with the same letters and the same boardtrying to get the highest possible score. The participants do not compete directly, but against an identical board for everyone and with the same time available, which makes the competition completely equal.
During the Granada championship, Richards managed to equal the maximum score obtainablea feat that made him the first non-native speaker player to do so in a game of Scrabble in Spanish. His method was the same that led him to victory in France: intensive memorization of words without the need to understand the meaning.
His dedication to memorization and strategy allows him to triumph against native speakers and top-level opponents. Richards embodies in himself the demonstration of potential of human memory and logic and how one can excel in a linguistic discipline even without mastery of the language itself.
