New Zealand's Nigel Richards wins French Scrabble crown
BBC wrote:The French-language Scrabble world championship has been won by a New Zealander who does not speak a word of French, competition organisers say.
Nigel Richards defeated a rival from French-speaking Gabon in the final in Louvain, Belgium, on Monday.
Mr Richards is said to have memorised an entire French Scrabble dictionary in nine weeks earlier this year.
A previous English Scrabble champion, he originates from Christchurch, New Zealand, and is now based in Malaysia.
He beat Gabon's Schelick Ilagou Rekawe two games to nil in Monday's final.
I wonder how this slipped past us!
Edit: According to the more fleshed-out story (which you can listen to also) on NPR, the French Scrabble dictionary has 386,000 words.
NPR wrote:...Richards is able to recall words very reliably. Here's how Fatsis says Richards does it, citing their previous discussions:
"Basically, what he does is, he looks at word lists and looks at dictionary pages... he can conjure up the image of what he has seen. He told me that if he actually hears a word, it doesn't stick in his brain. But if he sees it once, that's enough for him to recall the image of it. I don't know if that's a photographic memory; I just think it's something that his brain chemistry allows him to do."
Fatsis adds, "French Scrabble has 386,000 words. That's a lot – that's far more than in North American Scrabble: 187,000." ... But the game isn't just about words, Fatsis says: "It is a game of mathematics. It's a game of strategy, it's a game of spatial relations and board geometry. You have to have a math brain to be great at Scrabble."... "He did a lot of his Scrabble studying by bicycling for hours and hours and recalling those words and lists of words in his brain," Fatsis says. ...
