After English and French, Nigel Richards becomes world Scrabble champion in Spanish… without speaking the language – Libération

He’s a triple count champion. Nigel Richards, already an unrivaled master of English and French-speaking Scrabble, added a new string to his literate bow on Monday, November 11, by becoming world champion of Spanish-speaking Duplicate Scrabble in Granada, Andalusia. All without speaking a word of Spanish, any more than he speaks a word of French. To avoid the boredom of playing in his mother tongue – too easy – the gifted competitor simply memorized the dictionary, or in any case all the words allowed in Scrabble. Or, for the Spanish version, which also has double letters, “about four times more valid words” than the French-speaking one, Jean-Baptiste Morel explained on X.

Editor-in-chief of Actu.fr and Scrabble aficionado for around thirty years, the latter had fun live-tweeting the world championship broadcast on Twitch and where, despite his notoriety, the 57-year-old New Zealander was far from being a favorite. It took him quite a comeback to overtake the polyglot Lille Serge Emig, with an impressive track record on the Spanish-speaking scene and who was in the lead until the last part. Even more impressive, Nigel Richards will have matched the computer several times, capable of finding the best possible combination of letters each time.

“We didn’t realize it was a computer”

In 2015, by arriving in French-speaking competitions with his hypermnesia and his gruff manners, Nigel Richards surprised and fascinated the small world of Scrabble. “We knew he was a monster, was blowing at the time Liberation former world champion Benjamin Valor. We didn’t realize it was a computer.” The journalist of Libé sent specially to Louvain-La-Neuve, in Belgium, to meet the animal, had tried in vain to extract more than three words from him. Alas, the genius always refused to speak to the press, and did not “no exceptions”.

By winning this Scrabble Duplicate tournament – ​​a form of individual play where all players receive the same deck of letters and must each find the best word possible, the one that will earn them the most points – Nigel Richards now has his name on his list of achievements “four English-speaking Scrabble world champion titles, ten French-speaking titles, and one Spanish-speaking title”, says Jean-Baptiste Morel again. It remains to transform the attempt during the classic Scrabble test, but most people have no doubt that he is capable of it.