If we were to watch the adventures of Nigel Richards as presented in a documentary on the big screen, while sipping soft drinks and eating popcorn in the cinema, we would probably leave the theater grumbling about how it wasn’t believable. And it can be compressed. At the end of the day, if anything, it’s that Richards is incredibly and wildly unreasonable. Adam was born in New Zealand some 56 years ago and is now devoted to traveling the world, revealing the colors of native speakers of Spanish, English and French by pulverizing them in Scrablle, a game that relies heavily on lexicography.

It might not come as much of a surprise when put that way, but Richards doesn’t speak Spanish. Not French. If he can beat the Spaniards and Gauls on their own field, it is thanks to his extraordinary memory and extraordinary skill that people already refer to him as “the best Scrabble player of all time”. In case there was any doubt, he made it clear in Granada.

The most unexpected favorite. There are board games that are much more than board games. Scrabble is a good example of this. In addition to having a history of almost 80 years, it has a large fan base spread across the world. So extensive, in fact, that there are players’ associations, top-tier competitions and world tournaments, such as the one held in Granada in November, where 170 participants sit in front of the board to show who is best at putting letters together and forming words in Spanish. .

Competitors came from twenty countries. And not all of them speak Spanish. In fact, even before the tournament opened its doors, it was reported that one of the favorites, New Zealander Nigel Richards, did not speak even a lick of Spanish, as assured the EFE agency. Queer? Yes And No. Richards achieved similar success in the French Scrabble world in 2015. He also did not have a command of the local language at the time, but this did not prevent him from eliminating other French-speaking rivals.

Eight letters: Richards. No sooner said than done. In the La Didactic Scrabble Lecterns account published a few days ago, the November pools were completed and Richards took first place. He did this in a way that amazed ordinary people outside the game rather than Scrabble fans. For the first Richards, he is already a legend, as runner-up Benjamín Olaizola recently explained to the SER network. “We’re talking about a very special, incredibly gifted person, he’s very talented.”

“We’re talking about a New Zealander who won multiple titles in English and, after his retirement, titles in French and Spanish,” he said. His story is so amazing that Richards has pulled off something just as fascinating, even more fascinating: The Scrabble World Cup is making headlines with scares like: Country or sports newspapers Brand And Ace. The latter even called Richars the “GOAT”, a label created from the game’s initials. ‘The Best of All Time’.

But… How did you do this? The fact that SER spoke to Olaizola and not Richards is not causality. In fact, his name appeared in many Spanish media and none of them could get a single word in Spanish from the game’s new champion (the irony of Scrabble). The reason is simple: Richards is a master at putting letters together, but those who have met him describe him as extremely reserved. Polite, correct but short on words. He is not very interested in giving interviews either.

Therefore, we only know a few ideas about him and his Scrabble technique. That, and stories that sometimes seem halfway between reality and myth. For example, when he set out to win the French championship in 2015 without speaking the language, they say Richards chose a peculiar strategy reserved only for prodigious memoirists like his: He bought a dictionary and memorized all its words for nine weeks. shape them one by one and then with chips. In November, Efe said that to do something similar and win in Córdoba without speaking Spanish, you would have to remember the 690,000 dictionary terms allowed.

An unrivaled performance record. Whether he knows more or less about the languages ​​he competes in, whether he uses this or that strategy, one thing or another is undeniable: Richards has a natural talent for Scrabble. His profile on WESPA, the World English Language Scrabble Players Association, shows a 76% win rate. When you look at the list of official wins and losses in the tournaments in which he participated, you will see that the first one has the greatest weight.

Thanks to these numbers, he managed to become world champion many times and win numerous national championships and other competitions. “Just mentioning his name gives me goosebumps because he is a phenomenon,” another great Scrabble champion, Eric Salvador Tchouyo, recently told RFI.

“I often say that it could be a good thesis topic for doctoral students in medicine, because it is inconceivable that a person can memorize a language he does not speak to such an extent. If I speak of him with admiration, it is not because he speaks. He is an extraordinary person.”

We expand the legend. It’s truly fascinating that someone can win a game of word formation without knowing the language it belongs to, and do so by pitting them against the best opponents in their native language. But there is another characteristic of Richards that further expands his legend: his shy and mysterious personality. Little is known about him. Very little.

When the winner of the world championship was declared in the English version in 2018, Country He devoted a brief profile to himself in which he outlined some biographical data. And interestingly, these only serve to strengthen its aura of mystery.

We know that Richards is a native of Christchurch, a city on New Zealand’s South Island, who became interested in Scrabble at a certain age, at the age of 28, and then moved to Malaysia to work. We know you also love cycling. In fact, another of the stories revolving around him, in which it is difficult to distinguish what is myth and what is reality, is that when he participated in his first tournament in New Zealand in 1997, he pedaled a 14-hour journey. compete. Neither fatigue nor lack of sleep could stop him from winning.

“I wasn’t interested in words.”. His mother gave us a few more clues about Richards. And again they increase its mystery. Years ago, he explained to the press that the champion “wasn’t interested in words” when he learned to talk. His thing was numbers. “It was all about numbers. We took it for granted. Nigel was Nigel,” says his mother, adding that the young man did not stand out either in spelling or in English.

“I told her, ‘I know a game you won’t be very good at because you can’t spell and you weren’t good at English at school,'” her mother admits. He was wrong all along. Maybe he wasn’t interested in words when he was a child, but his extraordinary memory and ability with numbers did the rest.

Pictures | Wikipedia and Eljay (Flickr)

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