♟️ Spanish Scrabble World Championship
- Zaid Malik
- Mar 4
- 2 min read

Board Games - ♟️ Spanish Scrabble World Championship
Now I came across something in my 5 minutes (more like 500) of daily scrolling and in good conscience I couldn’t not share this with the Stump community. Today we are talking Nigel Richards, a New Zealander who a few months ago won the Spanish Scrabble world-title!
I’m sure you may be sitting there thinking, “Well Stump admin…why are you putting this across my desk on this fine Tuesday morning?” Well Stump reader, it’s because of this. Nigel Richards won this world-title for Spanish Scrabble…and he DOESN’T EVEN SPEAK SPANISH!
No, that was not a typo. Calling Richards a Scrabble ‘enthusiast’ would be a bit of an understatement. This guy IS SCRABBLE. He already has five English world-titles and in 2015 he also won the French-title as well (yes, this was also without speaking a lick of French). So how does he do it? You know how you have that one song memorized, verse for verse, line for line? Nigel does that with dictionaries! Cover to cover, he reads them, and he memorizes them, and then he is able to use that in the heat of battle in Scrabble.
Richards has been in the Scrabble space for 30 years and some call him the greatest of all time in the space. What he has done across languages is absolutely absurd. Yes, it seems to be a case of photographic memory that aids him, but still, to be able to do that and then apply it to Scrabble is absolutely ELECTRIC!
All of this being said, the Scrabble purists were not happy when Nigel walked into Granada, Spain and obliterated the competition. One called it “an incredible humiliation”. Maybe those guys don’t like it, but man what a story. A guy won a language-based competition without speaking the language!
I’ll sign off the way only way I think I can here. Adios!
Or as Nigel probably would, HOLA!
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