The winner of the Spanish World Scrabble Championships beat out more than 150 competitors, and he does not even speak Spanish.
Nigel Richards, a professional player from New Zealand, won the championships in Granada, Spain, after memorizing the official Scrabble list for the language, a friend of his told the Associated Press.
"He can't understand why other people can't just do the same thing," Liz Fagerlund, a New Zealand Scrabble official and a friend of Richards, told AP. "He can look at a block of words together and once they go into his brain as a picture he can just recall that very easily."
Richards, 57, only lost one game out of 24 at the November tournament, beating defending champion Benjamín Olaizola of Argentina, who won 18 of his games.
""We are talking about a person with very particular, incredible abilities; he's a gifted guy," Olaizola, who does speak Spanish, told Spanish news outlet Cadena Ser.
One of Cadena Ser's news presenters referred to the situation as "an incredible humiliation" after they shared that they were unable to interview Richards because of the language barrier.
This is not the first time Richards has won a Scrabble championship in a language other than his own native English. He previously won the French World Scrabble Championships in 2018 after similarly studying the list of approved words.
The professional player also has five English Scrabble world titles under his belt.
"No one in history had ever obtained 100% in a duplicate game, which is doing the same thing that the machine would do with the same letters. And this is what the New Zealander did on two boards," Olaizola told Cadena Ser.
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