The GOAT of Scrabble

The term "GOAT" (Greatest Of All Time) originated as a self-description by Muhammad Ali and has since fueled many a sports debate, particularly in professional basketball (LeBron James vs Michael Jordan) and football (Tom Brady vs Joe Montana, until Brady pulled away by amassing a total of seven championships late in his career).

Nigel Richards (Brady/PA/Zuma Press/WSJ)

There is no controversy, however, about the GOAT of Scrabble: [bold added]

Nigel Richards is the reigning world champion of Scrabble in Spanish. Just don’t ask him to order a coffee in Madrid. The 57-year-old New Zealander doesn’t speak a lick of Spanish.

During the deciding match in November’s Spanish World Scrabble Championship in Granada, Spain, Richards racked up triple-word scores with ENRUGASE (“to wrinkle up”) and ENHOTOS (an archaic word for “familiarity”), before clinching victory with TRINIDAD and SABURROSA (an obscure word that describes the coated residue of the tongue).

Not that Richards knew the meaning of any of those words.

One Spanish TV broadcaster called his win the “ultimate humiliation.” The global Scrabble community wasn’t so surprised. Richards had done this before—in French.

When he won that language’s Scrabble world championship in 2015 and again in 2018, he could greet his opponents with bonjour but couldn’t say much else.

What Richards lacks in linguistic ability he more than makes up for with an encyclopedic memory and an unrivaled ability to decode patterns, according to friends and opponents.

“He memorizes words as soon as he reads them once,” said Hector Klie, who has represented the U.S. in Scrabble since 2003 and competes in Spanish. “He doesn’t know whether a word is a verb, noun, adjective or any other grammatical form that would typically help native speakers learn words more easily. For him, all words are equal in his memory, and he doesn’t need to know their meaning.”

Richards is also the undisputed GOAT in English-language Scrabble, having won five world titles. He is currently ranked No. 1 by the World English-language Scrabble Player’s Association.

“We are witnessing someone who could be compared to, or even surpass in intellectual capacity, figures like Bobby Fischer, Garry Kasparov or Magnus Carlsen in chess,” said Klie, the Spanish World Championship runner-up in 2004.

The parallel to Nigel Richards that comes to mind is the large language models (LLMs) that are used in artificial intelligence. LLMs don't "know" anything in a traditional epistemological sense but are able to give the appearance of knowing by examining billions of pieces of information on the internet, recognizing patterns, and regurgitating answers that follow those patterns.

Of course, this means that someday a computer will beat Nigel Richards at Scrabble.