French Scrabble Champion Learns French In 9 Weeks!

The new Francophone Scrabble world champion, who doesn’t speak French, studied French dictionary for nine weeks before finals.

20:29 22 July 2015

Nigel Richards is the new French Scrabble Champion who doesn’t speak French. The New Zealander who lives in Malaysia studied French dictionary and all the hundreds of conjugations of French verbs, both regular and irregular, for nine weeks before finals.

 

Mr Richards, 46, defeated Schelick Ilagou Rekawe of Gabon by two games to one on Monday night. He has previously won the English language world Scrabble crown three times. 

 

“He is not a French speaker. I swear it,” said Yves Brenez, vice president of the Belgian Scrabble Federation. “If you speak to him he can only say ‘bonjour’, with an accent. He can give the scores in French, because the rules demand it, but that’s it.”

 

“He is a Scrabble war machine,” said Mr Brenez. “To him words are just combinations of letters.”

 

Mr Richards, who has a photographic memory, has started playing Scrabble 18 years ago and has won an estimated $200,000 in prize money. He recently won the King’s Cup in Thailand, the largest Scrabble competition in the world.

 

“We were all incredibly surprised,” said the tournament spokesman Antoine Rousseau. “We call him the Chris Froome of Scrabble... at one point we did think he might have had a microphone hidden in his beard.”