Nigel Richards, a 57-year-old Scrabble prodigy from New Zealand, has done it again — this time winning the 2024 Spanish-Language Scrabble World Championship, despite not knowing the language.
Richards, often called the “Tiger Woods of Scrabble,” has a history of remarkable feats in the world of competitive Scrabble.
In 2015, he stunned the world by winning the French-Language Scrabble Championship without being able to speak French.
His achievement was so unprecedented that many thought it was a one-time fluke.
But Nigel proved otherwise, repeating the feat multiple times and now adding Spanish to his list of linguistic triumphs.
Mastering Words Without Knowing Their Meaning
According to an article on Oddity Central, last month, Richards clinched the Spanish-language title in Granada, Spain, using the same method he employed to win in French — memorizing thousands of words without learning their meanings.
“The challenge was a bit crazy, but he learned French vocabulary in only nine weeks,” said Yves Brenez, vice president of the Belgian Scrabble Federation, back in 2015. “To him, words are just combinations of letters. He comes up with scrabbled words (more than seven letters) that others take years to know.”
For the Spanish competition, Richards applied his extraordinary memory skills, committing an enormous number of Spanish words to memory.
According to John Baird, secretary of the Christchurch Scrabble Club in New Zealand, Richards has an almost photographic memory, allowing him to absorb entire pages of words and recall them effortlessly.
