Nigel Richards, a 57-year-old New Zealand scrabble phenom, recently won the 2024 Spanish-Language Scrabble World Championship despite not speaking the language at all.

It’s been almost a decade since we first wrote about the talented Mr. Nigel Richards; He had just won the 2015 French-Language Scrabble Championship despite being completely unable to have a conversation in French. It was a remarkable feat that made international news headlines at the time. Richards was already known as the world’s best scrabble player and had earned nicknames like ‘the Tiger Woods of Scrabble,’ but this was completely unheard of. A person who didn’t speak French at all had run through the world’s best French-speaking Scrabble players to earn the title of world champion. Some thought it was a fluke, but Nigel has repeated the feat since, and he recently proved he could do it in other languages he didn’t speak.