Nigel Richards is one of the all-time great Scrabble players. He has a natural ability to memorize reams of words in no time, which makes him particularly well-suited to win international Scrabble competitions in languages that he can’t even speak. After all, Scrabble isn’t a game about stringing together sentences. It’s a game about individual words and the letters that compose them. That’s how he was able to win a Scrabble championship tournament in Spain without being able to speak a lick of Spanish.
This isn’t the first time the Tiger Woods of Scrabble (a real nickname of his) has done this. Back in 2015, he won the French-Language Scrabble Championship. Did he speak French? Hell no. He won that one the same way he won the Spanish one — he just memorizes a ton of words in whatever foreign tongue he needs to win a championship in the language homeland. This guy could probably win an Elvish Scrabble championship in Middle Earth if you gave him a few days and an Elvish dictionary.
What makes his ability to memorize these foreign language words all the more impressive is the compressed amount of time that he can do it in. When he won his French Scrabble championship back in 2015, he learned all of the French words he needed to win in only nine weeks. What helps is that he doesn’t have to learn the meanings of the words. He just needs to memorize the words as letter combinations that he can fit into a Scrabble board to maximize his point totals. He is unburdened by the context of a language and only sees words as letters with little point values on the bottom right. Words are not a part of a language to him, they’re just ammunition that he uses to mow down his Scrabble prey.
Melodramatic? Absolutely. But you kinda need to be when writing about a guy who is this dominant at something. A guy named John Bayard of the Christchurch Scrabble club of New Zealand suggests that Richards’ true power is a photographic memory, which allows him to “look at a page and retain the whole thing, it sticks like a photograph.” Of course, that skill would be nothing without Richards’ incredible ability to know how and when to deploy the words in a Scrabble game to decimate his opponents.
Richards is a Scrabble savant and there’s no telling what country he’s going to dominate next, but one thing is for sure — the rest of the world’s Scrabble boards should be quivering in fear, for Nigel Richards will soon be near.
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The post Spanish Scrabble Tournament Won by Man Who Doesn’t Speak Spanish appeared first on VICE.
