Posted on 12/13/2024 3:02:16 PM PST by nickcarraway
New Zealander, Nigel Richards, who speaks no Spanish, has won the Spanish-language world title in Scrabble.
Richards, a professional player who holds five English-language world titles, started memorising the language’s Scrabble word list a year ago and beat defending champion Benjamín Olaizola of Argentina, whose mother tongue is Spanish.
His victory was notable even by his standards, as he had to adjust his gameplay to compensate for different tile values between English and Spanish Scrabble rules, as well as contend with thousands of additional seven, eight, and nine letter words in the Spanish language.
Major news: Cheaper energy on the horizon as Spain powers ahead with Europe’s largest energy storage project He was the first player ever to hold the world, US, and British titles simultaneously, despite having to put to the back of his mind 40,000 English words that do not appear in the American Scrabble word list to triumph in the US.
Nigel Richard: Scrabble champ not only in Spanish, but French too In 2015, in spite of not speaking any French, Richards won the French World Scrabble title, after it is said he spent nine weeks studying a French dictionary. He then won it again in 2018 and 2019.
His mother, Adrienne Fischer, told a New Zealand press in 2010 that her son did not excel at English in school, he never attended university, and took a mathematical approach to the game rather than a linguistic one.
What really motivates Richards, who now lives in Malaysia, is a mystery because he never speaks to reporters. A New Zealand Scrabble official said that he gets lots of requests from journalists wanting to interview him, but he doesn’t understand what all the fuss is about.
How good is your Spanish vocabulary?
Impressive, but let’s see him do that using the
language of the Ojibwe Indians of Canada.
The word
miinibaashkiminasiganibiitoosijiganibadagwiingweshiganibakwez-higan
is 66 letters long and describes Blueberry Pie.
This is why they don’t play Scrabble.
[“Just mentioning his name makes me tingle; he’s a phenomenon,” Eric Salvador Tchouyo, a world champion Scrabble player from Cameroon, told Radio France Internationale.
“I often say he would make a good doctoral thesis topic for students in medicine because it’s incomprehensible that someone could have such memory capacity in a language he doesn’t speak.”
Describing Richards, 57, as an “exceptional” person, he noted that whenever Richards turned up at a tournament, the other players knew they were playing for second place at best.
“When Nigel Richards sits at a table, everyone loses their nerves, even the biggest champions,” he said. “Playing against Nigel Richards is like playing against a computer.”]
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