Spanish Scrabble Winner Does Not Speak Spanish

01A New Zealand man recently won an international Spanish Scrabble competition, although he does not speak Spanish.

02Scrabble is a board game in which players form words from letters to gain points.

03Nigel Richards is a professional Scrabble player.

04He holds five English Language World Championships in the board game.

05But in November, he won the Spanish World Scrabble Championship in Granada, Spain.

06In the competition, he lost one game out of 24.

07Many people are wondering how Richards could win without speaking Spanish.

08Liz Fagerlund is a New Zealand Scrabble official and a friend of Richards.

09She recently told the Associated Press that Richards started memorizing the Spanish Language Scrabble word list one year ago.

10She said he can't understand why other people can't just do the same thing.

11Fagerlund added he can look at a block of words together, and once they go into his brain as a picture, he can just recall that very easily.

12In second place was defending champion Benjamin Olayzola of Argentina.

13He won 18 of his games.

14Nothing like the New Zealanders' win had ever happened in Spanish Scrabble, said Alejandro Taranzani, an organizer of the competition.

15It was impossible to react negatively.

16You can only be amazed, Taranzani said.

17We certainly expected that he would perform well, but it is perhaps true that he surpassed our expectations.

18However, the recent Scrabble competition is not the first that Richards has won in a language that he does not speak.

19In 2015, he became the French Language Scrabble world champion, although he does not speak French.

20He studied the French Language word list for nine weeks.

21He won the French championship again in 2018.

22Richards is known in the world of international Scrabble as the greatest player of all time.

23He has been playing in competitions for about 30 years.

24But other players have said his Spanish language victory was notable even by his standards.

25Playing Spanish Scrabble required some different methods to win.

26The wooden pieces, or tiles, used in the word game have different values in English and Spanish Scrabble.

27Richards also had to consider thousands of additional seven, eight, and nine-letter words in the Spanish language.

28In 2008, Richards was the first player ever to hold the world, U.S., and British titles at the same time.

29He had to forget 40,000 English words that do not appear in the American Scrabble word list to win in the U.S.

30His victories are famous in the Scrabble community.

31Tens of thousands of people have watched and analyzed his games in YouTube videos.

32Scrabble does not require players to know the definitions of words.

33Players only need to know what combinations of letters can be used in a country's version of the game.

34Native speakers have a huge leg up.

35American Scrabble player Will Anderson said in a video explaining Richards' Spanish win.

36In 2010, Richards' mother, Adrienne Fisher, told a New Zealand newspaper that he was not a great English student in school.

37He never attended university.

38And he took a mathematical approach to the game, rather than a linguistic one.

39I don't think he's ever read a book, she said, apart from the dictionary.

40Fagerlund said Richards impressed her when he arrived at his first Scrabble club meeting at age 28.

41Two years later, in 1997, he rode a bicycle 350 kilometers from Christchurch to the city of Dunedin, where he won the New Zealand championship on his first try.

42Then he rode the bicycle home again.

43At the Spanish event, he was shy and modest, organizer Tadadzani said.

44But he happily had his picture taken and spoke with fans who sought him out.

45Although he did so in English, of course, Tadadzani joked.

46Richards now lives in Malaysia.

47He never speaks to reporters.

48What drives him is a mystery.

49I get lots of requests from journalists wanting to interview him.

50And he's not interested, Fagerlund said.

51She added that he does not understand what all the fuss is about.

52I'm Anna Mateo.