This year’s Spanish Scrabble champion is a man who can’t speak Spanish

Nigel Richards could barely exchange pleasantries in Spanish when he arrived at a Scrabble tournament in Spain last month, his competitors recalled.

Despite hardly speaking the language, the New Zealander, who has won dozens of Scrabble tournaments in English, was competing in the Spanish-language Scrabble world championship. Some of his competitors, who were fluent, doubted his chances, said Horacio Moavro, treasurer of the International Federation of Scrabble in Spanish.

“He shut our mouths completely,” Moavro told the Washington Post.

Richards won the competition in Granada, losing only one of his 24 games and topping 147 competitors from across the world. Benjamín Olaizola, the runner-up, told Spanish radio network La Cadena SER that Richards’ victory was a “humiliation.”

And it wasn’t even the first time Richards won a competition in a language he didn’t speak; he has won the French-language Scrabble world championships twice. Richards, who’s considered in the Scrabble community the best player ever, has left others stunned with his latest victory and desperate to understand how his brain works.

“Nigel shows us that we don’t understand the limit of the human brain,” said Stefan Fatsis, the author of “Word Freak,” a book about competitive Scrabble. “And he continues to, in his 50s, demonstrate that there are things the mind is able to do that we might’ve thought of as impossible.”

Richards, however, doesn’t think his Scrabble wins are a big deal, said Michael Tang, who organizes competitive Scrabble tournaments and said he has been friends with Richards for more than two decades. Richards, who is widely known for not giving interviews, could not be reached for comment.

The rules of competitive Scrabble are similar to casual games – the player who earns the most points through their word choices wins. In competitive Scrabble, however, players are given 25 total minutes per game to select their moves.

Most competitive Scrabble players prepare for tournaments by trying to memorize the officially sanctioned dictionary for each language’s game, Fatsis said. Richards possesses an eidetic, or photographic, memory that allows him to easily recall images of the dictionary’s pages, Fatsis said.

Richards, whom Tang said is 57 years old and lives in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, said in brief comments in 2011 that there isn’t a “secret” to his success.

“It’s just a matter of learning the words,” he said.

Adrienne Fischer, Richards’ mother, told the Sunday Star-Times, a New Zealand newspaper, in 2010 that Richards had been interested in numbers since he was a toddler and he started playing Scrabble as a 28-year-old. He didn’t attend college, according to the Sunday Star-Times.

“I don’t think he’s ever read a book, apart from the dictionary,” Fischer told the newspaper at the time.

Most competitive Scrabble players work full-time jobs, but Richards lives off prize money – typically between $5,000 and $20,000 for each tournament victory – and lives a minimalist lifestyle, Tang said. He doesn’t own a smartphone, Tang said, and he lives alone in a condo. He often cycles – his favorite hobby – to and from his hotel and tournament locations, Tang said.

Unlike many competitive Scrabble players, Richards doesn’t review recordings of his games in hopes of fixing mistakes, Fatsis said.

“He shows up, he wins and he goes back to his life,” Fatsis said.

After winning five World Scrabble Championships in English, two in French and dozens of other tournaments, Richards was seeking a new challenge, Tang said.

“He was bored,” he said.

For roughly the past year, Richards studied the Spanish-language Scrabble dictionary, memorizing about 600,000 words, Tang said. Between the English, French and Spanish Scrabble dictionaries, Richards has memorized how to spell about 1 million words, Tang said.

“He’s basically better than a computer,” Tang said.

Still, Richards isn’t the first person to win Scrabble tournaments in their non-native languages. Thai Scrabble players who speak rudimentary English have captured world titles.

Will Anderson, who won the 2017 North American Scrabble championship, said he remembers the English-language Scrabble dictionary the old fashioned way – by spelling the words frequently as practice. He said he couldn’t imagine memorizing another dictionary – let alone picking up strategies for using foreign language words.

Moavro said the strategy is different in Spanish-language Scrabble; there are more seven-, eight- and nine-letter words than in English-language Scrabble, so it’s common for Spanish players to use larger words and aim for more bingo bonuses.

During the tournament in mid-November, Richards used words that many of the other competitors had never heard of, Moavro said. That included “SABURROSA,” which is used in the medical phrase “língua saburrosa,” meaning a coated tongue. In one game, Moavro said he was impressed when “YE” was on the board and Richards used the letters to spell “DEYECCION,” which means defecation.

Richards also appeared to grasp the strategy. Early in his 21st game, Richards owned a small lead with six vowel tiles and an “S” tile in front of him. He could’ve played “DESOIA,” which means to ignore, for 24 points, Anderson said in a video analysis of Richards’ performance. Instead, Richards played “ORE” for nine points. On his next turn, he used all of his tiles to spell “ACOGIESE,” which means to receive, for 76 points, which included a bingo bonus.

Tang said he jokes with Richards that he picked the wrong game; he should’ve used his mind for chess, where top players can win more than $1 million in competitions.

Nonetheless, Tang said he’s excited to see what Richards will do next.

“The question now is: Will he take on Romanian Scrabble?” he said. “There are so many languages of Scrabble championships in play on the world level.”