God of Scrabble
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I recall Malaysia-based New Zealander Nigel Richards' multiple Scrabble championships in English and French from earlier years and thought that I had written about them, but apparently not on Language Log. Now he has won again, this time in Spanish, so it's about time that he became known to our readership, if they don't already know him..
"Scrabble star wins Spanish world title – despite not speaking Spanish: Nigel Richards has also been champion in English and – after memorising dictionary in nine weeks – French", Ashifa Kassam in Madrid, The Guardian (12/10/24)
—–
More than 150 competitors representing 20 countries descended on a hotel on the outskirts of Granada last month to battle it out at the Spanish World Scrabble Championships.
Now, weeks after the letter tiles were meticulously placed and the points tallied, news of the tournament’s winner, Nigel Richards, has made waves across Spain, with many scratching their heads over the fact he does not speak Spanish.
…
“This is someone with very particular, incredible abilities; he’s a gifted guy,” Benjamín Olaizola, who came second to Richards in the Spanish-language tournament, told the broadcaster Cadena Ser. “We are talking about a New Zealander who has won multiple championships in English – at least five of them.”
The Spanish title wasn’t the first time Richards’ Scrabble skills had shattered linguistic barriers: in 2015 he made headlines when he won the francophone world championships without being able to speak or understand French. Instead he reportedly memorised the entire French Scrabble dictionary in nine weeks.
“He doesn’t speak French at all – he just learned the words,” his friend Liz Fagerlund told the New Zealand Herald at the time. “He won’t know what they mean, wouldn’t be able to carry out a conversation in French, I wouldn’t think.”
In 2018 he again won the francophone tournament, casting off any suggestion that his French title had been a one-off.
After nearly three decades of playing Scrabble competitively, Richards is widely viewed as the best player of all time, with some chalking up his skills to his photographic memory and ability to quickly calculate mathematical probabilities. Intensely private and swift to turn down interviews, very little is known about his personal life.
…
“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 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.”
That's an interesting thought: a human being compared favorably to a computer in areas where computers are expected to excel.
Selected readings
- "Eggcorn is a Scrabble word?" Word Finder
- " Are there versions of Scrabble (or its clones) in languages besides English?", Quora
[Thanks to Don Keyser]
Update: Spotted in a Belfast bookstore:
Courtesy of J.P. Mallory.
martin schwartz said,
December 13, 2024 @ 8:10 pm
For me, the dictionary-memorizing scrabblers are like idiot savants
who cheat. I became aware of such people some years ago via
an aggressive scrabblerette from Thailand (Scrabble is very popular there) whose goal was just to win, and who had no interest in or
real knowledge of English literature, or even proper usage.
Big phrygian deal!–phooey and feh.
MS
martin schwartz said,
December 13, 2024 @ 8:12 pm
For me, such dictionary-memorizers are like idiot savants
who cheat. I became aware of such people some years ago via
an aggressive scrabblerette from Thailand (the game is very popular there) whose goal was just to win, and who had no interest in or
real knowledge of English literature, or even proper usage.
Big phrygian deal!–phooey and feh.
MS
martin schwartz said,
December 13, 2024 @ 10:46 pm
I rewrote my first comments, which had been wrogly adjudged as
repeating something I had already written; the 2nd version
avoiding the scr-word. The result was that both remarks
got printed. I add here that the mnemonic feat of the gamesters
involved concerns a special minimal canonical vocabulary
which arbirates the acceptability of the word-choices Thus, the
last word in my above messages does occur in some d'naries,
but is not in the aforementioned mini-lexicon, so, despite the high value
of the letters, could be challenged as board choices.
MSch
martin schwartz said,
December 13, 2024 @ 10:49 pm
I rewrote my first comments, which had been wrogly adjudged as
repeating something I had already written; the 2nd version
avoiding the scr-. The result was that both remarks
got printed. I add here that the mnemonic feat of the gamesters
involved concerns a special minimal canonical vocabulary
which arbirates acceptability. Thus, the
last w-d in my above messages does occur in some d'naries,
but is not in the aforementioned mini-lexicon, so, despite the high value
of the letters, could be challenged as board choices.
MSch
martin schwartz said,
December 14, 2024 @ 12:23 am
ho, again!
MS
rosie said,
December 14, 2024 @ 1:46 am
Some Scrabble players just have good memory. If you think they're using their good memory to play the game well is cheating, the game is not for you.
~flow said,
December 14, 2024 @ 3:31 am
I don't feel it's cheating when you memorize the entire dictionary to win at scrabble
bks said,
December 14, 2024 @ 7:47 am
You have written about him before:
https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=20144
Andrew Usher said,
December 14, 2024 @ 9:06 am
This does not show that he is 'cheating', just that the game is broken in this sense, at least as a high-level competitive activity. Scrabble was never intended to be a contest of this kind of memorisation. The nature of the dictionary likely makes the problem worse. It should ideally consist of all words that a well-read person might have encountered in actual use in the specified language, sensible derivations from them, and nothing else.
k_over_hbarc at yahoo dot com
bks said,
December 14, 2024 @ 10:36 am
Even before the "Scrabble Dictionary" existed, high-level players studied lists of words. They had no interest in what words meant, just in questions like, "Is octopuses a legal plural form?"
Richard Hershberger said,
December 14, 2024 @ 11:06 am
Memorization is not cheating. Even a semi-serious player memorizes the two letter words that aren't common English words. This is, however, why I concluded I am not interested much in Scrabble. The word games and puzzles that appeal to me are ones that reward breadth of lexicographic knowledge gained from being well read. Scrabble does this only to a limited point.
Peter Taylor said,
December 14, 2024 @ 3:35 pm
Scrabble isn't really a word game: it's an area control game. I have beaten native Spanish-speakers playing in Spanish quite a few times, not because my vocabulary is better than theirs but because I had more experience in the game and understood the strategic elements better.
Andrew Usher said,
December 14, 2024 @ 9:48 pm
Richard Hershberger mainly repears my point – it's the fundamental design of the game, not 'cheating' even in a broad sense, that results in this outcome. And I didn't say the official dictionary caused the problem, only that it likely makes it worse. For example, those two-letter words that one has to memorise probably shouldn't be in it.
Peter Taylor points out that there are non-lexical strategic elements in Scrabble. True, but of minor importance as moves are still about coming up with words.
bks said,
December 15, 2024 @ 6:07 am
Defense is an important part of the game at the highest levels of play. Top players know what letters remain near the end of the game and don't want to open up opportunities for their opponent. They do not always make the maximally scoring play.
Benjamin E. Orsatti said,
December 16, 2024 @ 8:32 am
Richard Hershberger said:
Do there exist such games? — I.e., those that can't be "gamed"?