WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — New Zealand man competing for the first time scrabble He created a game in Spanish, a language he doesn’t speak, and won the Spanish World Title for Board Games.
Professional player Nigel Richards, who holds five English-speaking world titles, won the Spanish World Scrabble Championship in Granada, Spain in November, losing just one of 24 matches.
Richards began memorizing Scrabble word lists in the language a year ago, her friend Liz Fagerland, a New Zealand Scrabble official, told The Associated Press.
“He doesn’t understand why other people can’t do the same thing,” she says. “He can see blocks of words together, and once they’re in his mind as a picture, he can recall them very easily.”
In second place was defending champion Benjamín Olaizola (Argentina) with 18 wins.
Contest organizer Alejandro Terenzani said nothing like the New Zealander’s feat had ever happened in Spanish Scrabble before.
“It was impossible to react negatively, only to be surprised,” Terenzani said. “We certainly expected him to perform well, but it’s probably true that he exceeded our expectations.”
Richards has done this before. In 2015, he became the French Scrabble world champion after studying word lists for nine weeks, despite not speaking French. He won the French title again in 2018.
Other players said Richards’ Spanish victory was remarkable even by his standards, as he is considered the greatest international Scrabble player of all time during his 30-year career.
While Richards makes up for the difference in tile values in English and Spanish Scrabble, he also has to deal with thousands of additional 7-, 8-, and 9-letter words in Spanish, which include You need a strategy.
In 2008 Richards held the World, American and British titles simultaneously, even though he had to “forget” 40,000 words of English that were not on the American Scrabble word list to win in the United States. He became the first player to do so.
His victories are legendary in the Scrabble community, where his games are analyzed in YouTube videos watched by tens of thousands of people.
In Scrabble, players don’t need to know the definition of a word, only what letter combinations are allowed in their country’s version of the game, but native speakers “have a huge advantage” said American Scrabble player Will Anderson in a video summarizing Richards’ content. Spanish victory.
Richards’ mother, Adrian Fisher, told a New Zealand newspaper in 2010 that Richards was not good at English at school, never attended university, and took a mathematical rather than a linguistic approach to the game. He said he took it.
“I don’t think he’s ever read anything other than a dictionary,” she said.
Ms. Fagerland said she was impressed by Ms. Richards when she first came to a Scrabble club meeting at age 28. Two years later, in 1997, he won the New Zealand title on his first attempt by cycling 220 miles (350 km) from Christchurch to Dunedin. Then I rode my bike home again.
Organizer Terenzani said he was shy and reserved at the Spanish tournament, but was happy to take photos and chat with fans who approached him.
“Of course, he spoke English,” Terenzani added.
The motives of Richards, who now lives in Malaysia, are a mystery. He never talks to reporters.
“We’re getting a lot of requests from journalists to interview him, but he’s not interested,” Fagerland said. “He doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about.”
___
Associated Press writer Joseph Wilson in Barcelona contributed.
