A man who does not speak Spanish wins the Spanish-Language Scrabble World Championship.

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Nigel Richards, a 57-year-old scrabble superstar from New Zealand, just won the 2024 Spanish-Language Scrabble World Championship despite not knowing any Spanish.

It’s been nearly a decade since we last reported about the talented Mr. Nigel Richards, who had just won the 2015 French-Language Scrabble Championship despite his inability to communicate in French. It was an incredible accomplishment that made international headlines at the time. Richards was already renowned as the world’s top scrabble player, earning labels like ‘the Tiger Woods of Scrabble,’ but this was utterly unexpected. An individual who did not speak French at all had defeated the world’s greatest French-speaking Scrabble players to claim the title of world champion. Some felt it was a fluke, but Nigel has repeated the feat repeatedly, and he recently demonstrated that he could do it in languages he did not know.

Nigel Richards won the 2024 Spanish-Language Scrabble World Championship in Granada, Spain, despite not knowing the language. How did he do that? In the same way that he won the world championship in French-language Scrabble: by remembering a staggering amount of Spanish words without trying to study their meanings.

“The challenge was ridiculous, but he learnt French vocabulary in just nine weeks. He is a fighting machine. To him, words are simply letter combinations. “I may be exaggerating a little, but he comes up with scrabbled (words with more than seven letters) that others take ten years to learn,” Yves Brenez, vice president of the Belgian Scrabble Federation, stated about Nigel in 2015.

Nigel Richards is capable of learning hundreds of thousands of words by heart and then applying them effectively against his opponents. According to John Baird, secretary of the Christchurch Scrabble club where Richards initially played, he “can look at a page and retain the entire thing; it sticks like a photograph.” Furthermore, he clearly has the ability to blend letters and see word possibilities.

All we can do now is wonder what language Nigel Richards will tackle next, as English-language Scrabble is no longer challenging enough for him.