On November 16, Nigel Richards once again claimed a world Scrabble championship. Many people believe Mr. Richards is the best Scrabble player ever.
In the game of Scrabble, players make the highest scoring word they can out of seven letter tiles that they have drawn.
In November, Granada, Spain hosted the Spanish-language World Championships. Players from Spanish-speaking countries around the globe came to compete in the tournament.
Mr. Richards is well known in the Scrabble world. He has secured the World Scrabble Championship five times.
Most of the other Scrabble championships Mr. Richards has won took place in the US, the UK, and around the world. Mr. Richards won the French World Scrabble Championships in 2015 and again in 2018.
Mr. Richards has an amazing memory and excels at math. He seems to choose the perfect word to give him the highest score.
His mother says she taught him to play Scrabble because she thought she could beat him. His other skills quickly allowed him to become a Scrabble champ.
He memorizes all of the words in the Scrabble dictionary for that language. His friend, Liz Fagerlund, says that Mr. Richards can look at a group of words and “they go into his brain as a picture.” She says he remembers them easily.
Mr. Richards started memorizing Spanish words about a year ago. He also learned a new scoring system, since the letters in the Spanish version of Scrabble have different point values. Mr. Richards’s hard work paid off. In the tournament in Granada, he won 23 games out of the 24 games he played.
He defeated Benjamín Olaizola of Argentina (who does speak Spanish). Mr. Olaizola has won the Spanish World Scrabble Championship three times and was the current champion until Mr. Richards beat him.
He doesn’t talk to reporters, and he doesn’t talk about his Scrabble playing methods. He lets his results speak for themselves.
Content contributed by NFK Editors, reported from Granada, Spain, sourced by newsforkids.net
