There are Scrabble champions, and then there is Nigel Richards. The 57-year-old New Zealander has become a legend in competitive Scrabble, and is widely recognized as one of the greatest players of all time.
Dubbed the “Tiger Woods of Scrabble,” Nigel Richards has won the World Scrabble Championship (for English-language Scrabble) five times (2007, 2011, 2013, 2018, and 2018). His other victories include five wins in the Scrabble Players Championship (North America’s largest Scrabble competition), eight wins in the UK Open, and 11 wins in the Singapore Open.
Richards has also won the coveted King’s Cup (also known as the Bangkok International Crossword Game Championship) a record 15 times. The King’s Cup is the Thai national Scrabble tournament (played in English) and the world’s largest Scrabble tournament, attracting up to 8,000 players.
Incredibly, Richards’ prowess extends well beyond games in English, his native language. In December 2024, Richard won his first title in the Spanish World Scrabble Championships, held in Granada, Spain, defeating a field of nearly 150 other players. He lost only one of 24 games. Perhaps the most amazing thing about this feat is that Richards, who grew up in New Zealand and now lives in Malaysia, does not speak Spanish—a fact that Spanish Scrabble players and media presenters described as an “incredible humiliation” and “the height of absurdity.”
Nigel Richards doesn’t speak French, either, but that didn’t stop him from winning two titles at the French World Scrabble Championships, in 2015 and 2018. Apparently, Richards spent nine weeks memorizing the French Scrabble dictionary before competing. His photographic memory and ability to calculate possible scores and probabilities have made him a formidable figure in the world of competitive Scrabble, apparently in whatever language he chooses.
Earn points with these Scrabble facts:
- Scrabble is very popular in Thailand, and many people use the game to improve their English skills. The Southeast Asian nation has produced numerous top international players, including two English-language world champions (Panupol Sujjayakorn and Pakorn Nemitrmansuk).
- The rules of competitive Scrabble are similar to the casual games that people play for fun, but with a 25-minute time limit per player.
- According to Michael Tang, a Scrabble tournament organizer and longtime friend of Nigel Richards, Richards decided to enter the Spanish-language competition because he was bored and wanted a new challenge. He spent about a year memorizing roughly 600,000 Spanish words.
