A 57-year-old word nerd from New Zealand just won the 2024 Spanish-Language Scrabble World Championship — and he doesn't speak a lick of Spanish.
And yes, this is the same Nigel Richards we wrote about in 2015 who won the French Scrabble World Championship without knowing how to speak French. (He's since won that title twice.) So how does he do it?
"He doesn't speak French at all, he just learnt the words," his friend Liz Fagerlund, the former president of the New Zealand Scrabble Association, said nine years ago. "He won't know what they mean, wouldn't be able to carry out a conversation in French I wouldn't think…[But] he does have a reputation for being the best Scrabble player ever."
One of Richards' special talents is that he "can look at a page and retain the whole thing, it sticks like a photograph," added secretary of the Christchurch Scrabble club John Baird, via Oddity Central. "On top of that, he's obviously got a very good ability to mix up letters and see the word possibilities."
Richards, whose native language is English, has won the English Scrabble World Championship five times — so far (but of course). And who knows how many other Scrabble tournaments he'll conquer around the world by simply (haha) memorizing an entire dictionary of foreign words?
(For more about the worldly word aficionado, see video below, posted by Will Anderson.)
