The Spanish Scrabble Champion who doesn't speak Spanish
I recently came across an interesting topic - Scrabble. The game everyone associates to be slow and boring, had much more interesting stories to tell.
The most recent one being something that happened last week - Nigel Richards won the Spanish Scrabble Championship without knowing how to speak a single word of Spanish.
Let's take a deeper look into Nigel's history with the game.
Nigel Richards was born in New Zealand and never even played Scrabble until the age of 28. This is unlike most other boardgames where most top players train in their early childhood to become prodigies by their teens.
He started his tournament career in 1996 but didn't find his dominant streak until 2007. Post which, he has been, undeniably and unanimously, the strongest player to have touched the board.
Nigel won the World Championship 5 times and US Championship 5 times, after which he decided he got bored of English and moved onto French.
Yes - that's right, he participated, won, and set new records in the French Scrabble Championship - all without knowing a single word in French, in 9 weeks.
He didn't stop there - he continued to win every French Scrabble tournament he attended, outperforming veterans who have been speaking and studying the language for years.
Just last week, he also aced the Spanish Scrabble Championships, winning with an impressive score of 23 wins and only 1 loss.
How hard is Scrabble?
Scrabble is a game of incomplete information - meaning, unlike chess for example, there are parts of the game state which are not accessible to both players. Player A will not know the tiles which Player B has drawn, but can theoretically guess what tiles are most likely in their hand if they kept track of all the tiles that were played. ( Hard, but top players have gotten quite good at it. )
Scrabble is not yet a "solved" game - even though computers are strong, they are still not "superhuman" ("super-nigel" to be more accurate). This is evident by the fact that Nigel outperformed one of the most popular Scrabble Programs by a large margin. These stats should also give you a picture of how much above the rest of the world Nigel is.
How does he do it?
The short answer - no one knows. Partly because Nigel hates to take interviews, and thus we probably won't ever get to know what's actually going on in the savant-like brain of his, and also because, as he himself has said, he has no idea why he is so good at it.
Some top players use alphagrams - in which you take all the letters in a word and arrange them alphabetically. This helps with pattern recognition. Once you get a bunch of tiles on your rack and need to think of words relating to a certain alphagram, recalling it becomes easier than random memorization. Nigel, on the other hand, has never been observed arranging his tiles alphabetically.
However, by no means is Nigel machine-like perfect. He has been known to slip up at times - not because of the lack of knowledge, but because of things like accidental misspellings, or accidentally placing tiles one square off. He has also lost a few games here and there - sometimes because the opponents played amazing, sometimes because of sheer bad luck in the tile draws.
Either way, till a worthy competitor comes along, Nigel Richards will remain the undisputed king of the Scrabble World.
What language will he master next? Only time can tell. Ending the post with a pleasant picture of Nigel, unlike most of the popular media of him seeming unemotional.
Till the next post, tchau!
If you're interested in knowing a bit more about Nigel, I highly suggest watching Will Anderson's YouTube Channel. Most of my interest piqued after going through his videos on Nigel.