A rumor that has circulated online since November 2024 claims that a man from New Zealand, Nigel Richards, won a Spanish-language Scrabble championship without even speaking the language.
The rumor spread on social media platforms such as Reddit (archived) and X (archived). One Facebook post (archived) included an explanation of how Richards could play competitively in other languages which read, in part:
Richards doesn’t rely on meaning at all. Instead, he uses his extraordinary memory and pattern recognition to memorize thousands of words from official Scrabble dictionaries — purely by sight. He reportedly spent about a year memorizing the entire Spanish Scrabble lexicon, focusing only on word forms, letter combinations, and strategy. To him, the words are like shapes on a map — puzzles to place, not sentences to speak.
Snopes was able to verify Richards’ victory at the “XXVI Campeonato Mundial de Scrabble,” the 26th Spanish World Scrabble Championship in 2024. However, because Richards does not give interviews, we were unable to independently verify his lack of proficiency in the language. As such, we have left this claim unrated.
What we do know
According to an official blog documenting the 2024 Spanish World Scrabble Championship, Richards won 23 out of 24 games, taking home the “champion of the world” title.
Richards is said to be one of the greatest Scrabble players of all time, having won several championships in the English version of the game and even a few titles in the French version. Scrabble grandmaster and YouTuber Will Anderson explained via Facebook Messenger how Richards is seen in the competitive community:
There are plenty of English language players who are as devoted as you could imagine to mastering that lexicon for Scrabble purposes, and will never reach his level — and then he goes and does the same thing in two other languages. It’s fair to ask whether he is the best player at his chosen game of any game player in history.
Strategy in Scrabble differs greatly between languages due to variable word lengths and the utility of individual letters changing entirely. Anderson said that Spanish-language Scrabble has “a lot of different nuances from English.”
In an interview with NPR’s “All Things Considered,” journalist and Scrabble expert Stefan Fatsis broke down how Richard supposedly memorizes entire dictionaries without actually knowing how to use the words outside of Scrabble:
Basically, what he does is, he looks at word lists and looks at dictionary pages… he can conjure up the image of what he has seen. He told me that if he actually hears a word, it doesn’t stick in his brain. But if he sees it once, that’s enough for him to recall the image of it. I don’t know if that’s a photographic memory; I just think it’s something that his brain chemistry allows him to do.
We reached out to Fatsis for more information about Richards’ memorization process and will update the story if we receive a response.
For further reading, Snopes investigated the claim that Wimbledon umpires learn curse words in multiple languages to better prohibit swearing.
