While Scrabble has undoubtedly caused unhealable household rifts as family members argue over whether “Qat” is actually a word, one man is on the wrong side of an entire nation because of his Scrabble skills.
As The Associated Press reports, Nigel Richards of New Zealand won Spain’s Scrabble championship despite not actually speaking Spanish.
Instead of learning the language, Richards memorized all of the eligible Spanish Scrabble words.
“He can’t understand why other people can’t just do the same thing,” Liz Fagerlund, a friend of Richards’, tells the 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.”
“It was impossible to react negatively, you can only be amazed,” adds tournament organizer Alejandro Terenzani. “We certainly expected that he would perform well, but it is perhaps true that he surpassed our expectations.”
Who knows if the press-shy Richards, who doesn’t give interviews, accidentally picked up any Spanish on the way to his championship win, but he’s certainly not “un perdedor,” as Beck famously sang.