Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - The French Scrabble Champion

Episode Date: July 30, 2020

Nigel Richards is unquestionably the greatest Scrabble player in history. The 52-year-old Kiwi is a five-time world champion, and the only player ever to win more than once. He is a five-time United States Champion and has won more major tournament titles than anyone else. However, all these accolades are probably not his greatest Scrabble accomplishment. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Nigel Richards is unquestionably the greatest Scrabble player in history. The 52-year-old Kiwi is a five-time world champion and the only player ever to win more than once. He's a five-time United States champion and has won more major tournament titles than anyone else in history. However, all of these accolades are probably not as greatest Scrabble accomplishment. Learn more about what really put Nigel Richards into the pantheon of Scrabble on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night.

And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. This episode is brought to you by the Travel Photography Academy. Have you ever been on a trip and wondered? why your photos don't turn out like the images you see in travel magazines? If you're going to spend thousands of dollars on a trip and hundreds to thousands of dollars on a camera, you owe it to yourself to get the highest quality images from your trip. That's why I created the Travel Photography Academy. I set out to travel around the world in 2007 with an expensive camera and I had no idea how to use it.

As I traveled around the world, I taught myself the art of travel photography, eventually mastering it to a point where I was named Travel Photographer the Year three times in North America. The Travel Travel Photography Academy is an online course that teaches you everything you need to know to master your camera and to take better photos on your next trip. To improve your photography and to get better images on your next trip, visit Travel Photographyacademy.com or click in the link in the show notes. For those of you who are not aware, Scrabble is a board game that's played on a 15 by 15 grid, and the object is to create words on the grid using tiles you randomly select with letters on them. Think of it as competitive crossword assembly. The game was created in 1938 during the Great Depression by American architect Alfred Mosher Butz. He determined the value of the letters by determining the frequency of how often the letters were used in words.

The game was originally called Chris Crosswords. In 1948, James Bernou purchased the rights to Chris Crosswords and agreed to pay Butts a royalty on every unit he sold. He did some minor modifications to the rules and to the board, but most importantly, he changed the name of the game to Scrabble. Bernou's family made each of the games by hand, but it lost money until 1952 when the president of Macy's department store played the game while on vacation and was surprised that the store didn't carry it. Macy started stocking the game, and it took off. However, Bernou couldn't keep up with the demand, so he sold the rights to Scrabble to board game company, Seschlo and Ryder. Owner Harriet Writer said, it's a nice little game, it'll sell well in bookstores. Within two years, over four million copies were sold.

forward several decades, and a hardcore group of Scrabble players began competing in competitive tournaments. In 1978, the North American Championship was launched and the World Championship in 1991. Into this environment, we can now introduce Nigel Richards. Nigel Richards appears to be a rather unimposing man, middle-aged, sporting a gray beard, he rarely gives interviews and rarely shows emotion. Other Scrabble players will joke that it's difficult to tell if Richards has just lost a game or has won a world championship. Growing up in New Zealand, he didn't play Scrabble until he was 28 years old when he was introduced to the game by his mother. She said she didn't expect him to be very good at it because he could never spell well and had not been a particularly

good student in English class. Within two years of discovering the game, he was playing in competitive tournaments. In 1998, he rode his bicycle 14 hours from Dunedin to Christchurch, New Zealand, and won the New Zealand National Championship, and then rode 14 hours back home. In about 2007, Richard's really started killing it in the world of competitive Scrabble. As noted in the introduction, he's won the World Scrabble Championship five times, and he's the only person to have won it more than once. He's won the United States National Scrabble Championship five times as well, which is more than any other person. The world's largest annual tournament is the Thailand International King's Cup. He's won that 14 times. He's won the Singapore Open Scrabble

championship 12 times and the UK Open Championship 10 times. Everything I've mentioned is a record and is far above the next closest person. Scrabble rankings are determined like chess rankings. Nigel Richards holds the highest rating ever at 2,307, and his lifetime competitive winning percentage is close to 75%. The number of points he scores per game is way above anyone else as well. If you can average 400 points per game, you are one of the world's elite players. Richards averages over 450. His margin of victory is 55 points, and that is mostly competing against other world-class elite players. So I hope I've established that Nigel Richards is a very, very, very, very good Scrabble player.

However, behind everything I just said, there's one underlying assumption that I haven't mentioned. Every one of those tournaments and championships has been in English. Even though Scrabble was initially created with the English language in mind, there are many other variants of the game in other languages that use the Latin alphabet. Mattel, the current owners of the game, estimates there are at least 55 different language versions of it. Some of those other languages have competitive Scrabble competitions as well. In particular, French. In 2015, Nigel Richards decided to enter the French Scrabble World Championships.

And he won. Given how good Richards is at Scrabble, this is still an impressive accomplishment. No one else has ever won a tournament in two different languages. To do so requires a master of vocabulary of not just one language, but two. Winning the championship itself really isn't the most impressive part of this achievement, however. The most impressive part is the fact that Nigel Richards doesn't speak French. Yep, he doesn't speak French. he can't hold a conversation.

How did he win a world championship in French if he doesn't speak French? Well, he just memorized all of the words in the French dictionary. All 386,000 words. And he did that in just nine weeks before the tournament. Richards has what many would call a photographic memory. Once he sees an image of something, he can recall it. In the case of learning French vocabulary, he often has no clue what the words mean or how they could be used in sentences.

He just knows it is a word and it is spelled a certain way. He doesn't even know how many of the words would be pronounced. He does, however, know that if he has a certain combination of tiles in front of him, that he can put these words together to score points. He's won the French Classic World Championship twice so far, and he's won other derivations of the game several times as well, including three World's Paris Championships, two Blitz duplicate championships, and two elite duplicate championships,

all in French. In 2018, he won all four titles in a single year. Author Stefan Fastus, who wrote the book Word Freak, a book about competitive Scrabble Players, describes Richard's accomplishments as follows. Richards is like Tiger Woods at his peak. And then Tiger saying, I think I'll also take up tennis, and then winning Wimbledon the next year. Executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is James Mackle. Special thanks to everyone who supports the show over on Patreon.

on. Please remember to leave a review over on Apple Podcasts. Even a simple review can really help the show get discovered in the sea of other podcasts that are out there.