Thanks to Anderson, I anticipated that this would be Nigel Rogers before reading the article.

> You don't need to speak the language, just be really good at memorizing lists of words.

That's half of it, the other prerequisite is that you have to be Nigel Richards.

Yes he also won the French one after memorising the dictionary in nine weeks!

There was a Scrabble documentary called Word Wars (2004) and a crossword documentary called Wordplay (2006) that came out relatively close in time. Both are excellent films but reveal just how different fans of these two popular word games are. The top level crossworders had a general fund of knowledge and were mostly “normal” people. The hardcore Scrabblers were monomaniacs and dispositinally eccentric in many cases.

Another piece of evidence in favor of my view that pretty much all competitive games and sports are awful when perfectly optimized.

A while back on a similar story about English scrabble posted here, someone commented with a story about how they were in a tournament where their opponent played some super esoteric word, and then they played the word "twig", which their opponent immediately challenged.

I have to imagine that at the highest levels play, people who are good at memorization will dominate regardless of fluency.

The article mentions this in the subtitle and body.

Incredible recall of such an obscure fact that isn’t mentioned in the subtitle of the linked article.

It’s in the subtitle of the article that he also won a French tournament. Please read the article.

There’s slightly more to it than that. There are also differences in strategy based on the differing distribution of letters in the game (Spanish removes some letters, adds other, adds ñ, and adds digraphs like LL, RR, and CH), differing distribution of letters in the spanish language, and some point value changes. This matters more in the probabilistic phase of the game than when scrabble transitions to a perfect information game in the end-game when no tiles are left in the bag (so each player know the board, their hand, and what the other player must have).

You must develop a deep intuition for when to play the max scoring word you can find vs when to hold some letters in reserve in hopes of drawing even better hand next turn, etc.

I have a vague memory of reading that scrabble in a language that you don't speak has its advantages, as your brain isn't wired to favour words that it uses more often which may not be so valuable in scrabble

And, in the case of Spanish, the conjugations, which are valid to play in Scrabble.

Also you need to memorize the different point values of the letters and different tile frequencies for Spanish or French.

It really challenges the assumption that language mastery is only about communication

indeed! related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21377311

I don't know about his Spanish Scrabble performance, but when he won the French Scrabble championship, there were players who attempted the French equivalent of "play salirás and see if he notices," and Nigel challenged all of them.

I don't know Spanish scrabble, but I have played Finnish scrabbe - another language that relies heavily on conjugation - and it disallows all conjugated and declined forms of words, except for nominative plurals.

Nigel Richards reportedly[1] memorized the full French dictionary over the course of nine weeks (he doesn't speak French either). The way he did this is by reading through the dictionary twice and reciting the words to himself while on bike rides.

He has an incredible mind.

[1] https://youtu.be/T-8NrvVqbT4?si=u797T9o1E-R8TL6J

When Scrabble players talk about a "dictionary" they really just mean a list of words that are acceptable.

They're not actually learning anything other than "_______ is an acceptable string."

So even if just "pensar" is in what you and I would call a "dictionary", the Scrabble-acceptable word list will contain every form of it.

You're allowed to like words in whatever way you want, friend. Let's not invent a moral hierarchy where there isn't one.

As far as I understand, he's not actually learning the languages he play in, he is "just" memorising words from the dictionary.

Probably would make it way easier if he decided he wanted to learn one of those languages, but just knowing words doesn't make you proficient in comprehension and be able to create sentences.

Would you say the same about other silly things people pursue? We just had the article about the 18 year old chess champion. Surely dedicating your life to chess is about as silly as dedicating your life to scrabble. But we celebrate the chess master, and don't wonder aloud why he didn't pursue more ambitions things...

>interact with millions on a privileged position

What does this mean? Does learning multiple languages automatically make you famous? 43% of the world's population is bilingual.

Who are you to tell someone how to live their life? Winning a Scrabble championship isn’t hurting anyone.

It is not really learning the language, think of it has having such a good memory he can keep and process (to formulate strategies over the board) hundreds of thousands of strings, he might or not keep metadata on the strings but what matters is knowing they can be played.

Being a scrabble champion is not mutually exclusive to real-world impact. If a Scrabble expert lived a day in our shoes as software developers, I bet they'd think we're a net drain on society too.

You can find many annotated games if you check some higher-ranked players at www.cross-tables.com. Pull up a player's page such as Mack Meller and there's a whole slew of games he's played which you can view.

A quick search gave me https://youtube.com/@NASPAScrabble/

I came here to find/make this comment.

This is pretty much the argument on why LLMs do not perform "reasoning" in the same way we do.

He memorized the series of valid letters. That's it. He still has no idea what "ongle" is, just that it's a perfectly valid French scrabble word. Certainly just knowing all the legal sequences of letters does not buy you much.

If you study a language more distant from English than French, you'd be surprised at how even knowing all the meanings can still leave you pretty baffled at the meaning of a sentence.

You do have to get farther away from English than French though; I can still half-read French off of a 4-year "not all that great" study in high school, and that's more a testament to how knowing enough English to recall Latin roots we don't use in our main vocabulary and some of the most common French words that are different from English is enough to read an awful lot of French from an English start than any skill of mine. I tried half-a-dozen words in Google Translate to pick my example above before I finally found a word that was either different enough that it wasn't basically the same as it is in English ("ski" -> "ski"), or something with enough Latin roots that English also uses that a strong English speaker would have a pretty decent chance of guessing ("smelly" -> "malodorant").