Scrabble star wins Spanish world title despite not speaking Spanish | Hacker News Reader

Scrabble star wins Spanish world title despite not speaking Spanish

theguardian.com

160 pointsn1b0m128 comments

Will Anderson, another competitive Scrabble player and 2017 North America national champion, made an interesting and in-depth Scrabble analysis video about Nigel Richards' 2024 Spanish World Championship win that people here might enjoy watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RvNxkQ6Bgs

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

I believe the same thing happened with the French Scrabble tournament. You don't need to speak the language, just be really good at memorizing lists of words.

> 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!

How exactly does one memorize an essentially random list of approximately 40,000 strings such that they could pull any of those strings out a hat at will in just 9 weeks?

What kind of sorcery would even make that possible?

Apparently his mother said, about teaching him Scrabble:

"When he learnt to talk he wasn't interested in words, just numbers. I said: I know a game you're not going to be very good at because you can't spell very well and you weren't good at English at school."

I guess the sorcery you are looking for is spite.

Scrabble really is a maths game. It just looks like a word game.

Right. It's not a word game, it's an area-control game with 150,000 rules for legal placement of your resources.

Codenames is a word game. Scrabble is about arbitrary sequences of glyphs.

Interestingly there are versions with more restricted tilesets and hence fever words to learn. Like one that only uses the letters of BOGGLE.

> the sorcery you are looking for is spite.

Both philosophical and poetic. True brilliance.

amen to that

The strings are neither random nor independent. There are many English cognates, groups of related words, patterns of word formation, etc.

It's still an insane feat, since it typically takes actual language learners years to get anywhere close to a native speaker's inventory of 10,000+ words.

Many players do indeed memorise groups of related words and patterns of word formation.

But Nigel Richards? He's on another level: https://youtu.be/35rqRFXPWJo?t=143 knowing even exceptions to patterns and differences between dictionaries, for 9-letter words, in a game where players only have 7 letter-tiles.

I guess he really is a world champion!

“Patterns” is the key there. Knowing that *OOD has 6ish options is more useful than memorizing each word.

Depends which language learners. There are people who can learn 50 new words a day for months, but those people are rare and there feats are probably not replicable for most of us.

https://isaak.net/mandarin/ is an example

edit: Isaak is great, but it was 22 words per day not 50

My pace is typically 35 words a day when learning languages and most people think that's insane. It's still only around 1000 a month, which is why I chose that number. That's on the order of 12k a year if you don't miss a single day, which you usually do.

The claim here is memorizing a full dictionary in 9 weeks. That has to be at least 40,000 words in 63 days. 634 words per day. And then or forgetting it.

It's beyond rare. Its alien.

That's fairly different though, he doesn't need to learn the definitions, just memorize the strings. Which is still unbelievable.

Have you learnt many languages? I wish I had the energy to wanna do it.

In school 35 words a day would be really pushing it for me. It had a really hard time learning English words. I had to study like an hour for 20 words to pass the test. But I learned grammar really fast.

Japanese, Chinese and Korean. Fluent in Japanese, can watch kdrama and mostly follow along and have basic conversations in Korean, forgot virtually all the Chinese I did but I managed to pass HSK2 after 2 months of study and then HSK3 the following month. I was only in China for 3 months on a work trip, so I thought I'd have some fun.

What do you use to learn different languages? Firstly, where you get your vocabulary from but also pronunciation and grammar?

Anki, Netflix, Preply and social clubs.

I start by front loading all the grammar study up to upper-intermediate level as fast as possible. Usually a premade Anki deck of a few thousand sentences will be available for this.

Vocab I pick up from native media. I just read or watch whatever I'm interested in, lookup words as I go and put them into Anki. I do full immersion and it works well as access to entertainment in my target languages is a key goal.

Pronunciation I pick up through a crap tonne of exposure to native media.

Conversation is through a combination of private tutoring and finding people who speak my target languages to hang out with.

Native speakers have an inventory on the order of 30,000 ~ 40,000 words, and it takes them 30 years for their vocab to reach its peak. I had an Anki deck I built up over a 2 year period containing 17.5k vocab for Japanese and I would still frequently encounter words I didn't know.

If you don't actually know the meanings of the words, they may as well be random. What do you have to remember them by if you have no meaning to attach to them?

It's not even an insane feat. It's inhuman.

Inhuman might be going too far since it would imply Nigel Richards isn’t human. <End pedantic rant>

Also if one takes character patterns (which words are) and attach other characteristics, such as number of occurrences of individual characters or use ascii numbering to convert to numbers, then these character patterns (aka words) might be simpler to memorise.

Meaning is only necessary if you intend to speak the language.

Well he sure ain't a regular human.

If you're applying mnemonics to remember things then the act of doing so also takes time and energy. The issue here is the volume of information in the stated time span.

It’s certainly an amazing feat and it demonstrates what humans can actually do if they set their minds to it.

Just a pity that there are so many regular humans.

I don't think it really demonstrates what humans can do if they can put their mind to it. I think it demonstrates what a 1 in 8 billion type edge case looks like.

Imagine if that’s the norm though. I doubt very much we would be wondering how to get to Mars.

Also Nigel Richards probably doesn’t spend much time watching Netflix or shopping on Amazon. Probably very much focussed on scrambling.

A world where one in eight billion binge watches Netflix would truly be an interesting world!

Apparently he doesn't own a computer. Imagine a world where none of us owned computers!

Yeah, likely an outlier for hardware acceleration, just like some people are insanely good at reconizing faces they saw once 20 years ago. That’s not cognitive load, that’s specialized parts of the brain performing far better than most people.

A world where human intelligence made such rapid process as CPUs. Stuff of science fiction.

While knowing every possible word is very helpful in scrabble, the most useful, important words for the game will be very different than the words that are useful for speaking the language well. There's many words out there that are going to be almost unusable, as they are low value. So you aren't really going to need all the words, but you want to memorize basically every word that uses the high scoring tiles, and understand how wide the 'gaps' you are leading when you leave high value letters on the board, especially near high scoring, whole word tiles.

So you arent' overestimating how long it takes to memorize words, but how useful having a good, normal vocabulary in the language actually is for being good at scrabble. Go look at guides for English scrabble, and see the words you are trying to memorize.

Be that as it may, Nigel Richards (the scrabble star in this story) apparently knows virtually every word regardless, and fairly minimal study (supposedly).

It would be interesting to determine how few words a Scrabble program needs to know to be a world class player!

It will be probabilistic, because of the randomness of the draw. More words = greater chance of high scoring words for this board and draw. It likely wouldn’t take many words at all to beat a workd class player 1% of the time, and a pretty substantial vocabulary to win 99% of the time.

Actually, 99% may not even be achievable because sometimes your opponent will just luck out with letters and board lineup.

Sorry, but you do not *want to "basically memorize every word that uses the high scoring tiles." Rather, you want to study the low-scoring tile-filled words because those are more likely to be found on one's rack.

A key to high-scoring games is scoring "bingos" or using all 7 letters in a rack in a single turn as it gives a 50 point bonus. This is why we're taught to memorize the word lists that have such letters as TISANE in them as that string combines with most every other letter to make a bingo. The letters in TISANE are 1 point each.

You also don't want to leave vowels (all of which are worth 1 point each) adjacent to the bonus squares. A parallel play with an I under/to the right of a triple-letter-square can easily score 62 if one puts a Q on the triple and another I to make QI both ways.

The "sorcery" you're looking for is the correct genetic sequences that leads to an eidetic memory. No amount of compensation using mnemonic devices and memory palaces will get you even close to what Nigel Richards is capable of.

Eh, I bet he’s using some normal Latin vocabulary and orthography skills too. I suspect he wouldn’t do quite at well memorizing a truly random set of combinations of 26 symbols.

Right it’s not random that it was French, and not, say, Russian.

You say that, but there are some world-class Scrabble players from Thailand who play Scrabble in English, a language with a completely different alphabet and orthography from their native tongue. They don't necessarily speak English well, either. One beat Nigel Richards for the World Championship in 2009 [0].

I think it would take Richards about 20 minutes to learn the Cyrillic alphabet and a few weeks to get familiar enough with the patterns of Russian to be a competitive player in that language. World champion is obviously a harder ask, but I wouldn't rule it out.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakorn_Nemitrmansuk

Sounds like his next challenge.

Genetic, or epigenetic!

Where did you pull that number from? The ODS which is the official French Scrabble dictionary has something like 300,000 words.

In 9 weeks that's averaging memorizing several THOUSAND words PER DAY.

And don't give me BULL like "well plurality S/ES means a lot less" - yeah. NO. He still has to remember which words take what kind of plurality. And if you watch ANY interviews with him, you can tell he doesn't really take any shortcuts - he just straight-up memorizes them as a series of playable "tokens".

I'm all for the "indomitable human spirit" but you could practice 24/7 and you'd still be SCRABBLING at base camp while Nigel Richards summitted Everest without the aid of supplemental oxygen.

https://github.com/Thecoolsim/French-Scrabble-ODS8

Scrolled to a random position in the file, and there's 37 lines of all declinations of the word "monologue". Followed by a bunch of nouns with just two to four forms, followed by 47 declinations of the word "monopolise".

What he did is no small feat. You still have to memorize which suffixes are possible in which verbs (there are rules he would pick up on, but there are exceptions to the rules). But it is made easier by French verbs having a lot of possible suffixes, those suffixes being fairly regular, and English taking a lot of its "fancy" words with French (or adopting a Latin version that's close to what French adopted from Latin).

I still couldn't come close to thinking about achieving it. He is doing the extreme sport version of scrabble for sure.

And these advantages in French make it even more impressive that he could do the same even in Spanish.

I actually don't think the exceptions are much of a problem overall. Most irregularities in a language happen with the most common words. Once you go from learning the most common words to simply learning all the words, the relative frequency of irregular formations that you encounter would go down dramatically.

98% of those words are useless for competitive Scrabble.

he knows them anyway

Reportedly, by reading through the list twice and then reciting it to himself on bike rides.[1]

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

Some just have different brains. I think most people could not do that no matter how hard they tried, but with billions of people some just can.

It's not as hard as you think, he's an English speaker and French and English shares approximately 40% of the vocabulary. And once you have mastered French, you have the other 80% needed for Spanish as it's a Latin language like French.

How hard do you think I think it is? Are you implying that it's easy for an English speaker to master the English scrabble word list?

Well, I think it is impossible, so the comment works for me.

And I refuse to update my priors to account for the fact that somebody did it. Because I can’t even memorize the English scrabble dictionary well enough to enjoy playing. I am happier to live in a universe in which Scrabble is just impossible.

For the stated time frame, it's definitely as hard as you think, and then much, much, much harder.

It's a tiny bit easier town that in that if you learn a tiny bit of grammar you can extrapolate sets of reloted words where you add an extra E or S or both.

Most of the points are in bonuses and bongos, so you don't have to care much about the short words with common letters.

Will Anderson, another Scrabble champion/grandmaster, uploaded a video talking about Nigel's win here. The win is a lot more impressive than memorizing bingoes - Spanish scrabble has different letter distributions and point values, resulting in different metas. He didn't just memorize the Spanish Scrabble dictionary - he learned how to play Spanish Scrabble and dominated the first Spanish tournament he participated in.

Definitely worth a watch if you're interested in Scrabble at all: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RvNxkQ6Bgs

In fact, you do need to care about the short words.

1. they can be useful at locking down the board

2. knowing all of the words is necessary to be able to challenge when somebody attempt to play a phony, which, as a native Spanish speaker, you might be even more inclined to try against a non-native speaker.

Do professional scrabble players use fake words as a strategy? I assumed that (minus the weirdo savant playing in a foreign language), everyone at the professional level has an extensive vocabulary for which it would be difficult to bluff.

Scrabble players at world champion level operate at the very edge of what is or isn't a word.

Everyone knows words like "fork", "vogue" and "alligator" but only scrabble players know whether or not "forkier", "defork", "voguier", "voguiest", "alligatored" and "alligate" are real words.

It's not super common but if I was playing against somebody who didn't speak the lingua franca I'd probably throw out a couple phonies to test the waters.

The CSW is the official English word list used internationally (outside of the US/Thailand/Canada because we just HAD to be different) and contains over a quarter of a million words. Unless you're at the UPPER OF UPPER ECHELONS, there's a chance a crafty player could slip a phony in by hooking an "S" on the board or some other subtle stem - especially with the pressure of time controls.

There was at least one case of someone trying this against Nigel in French, and he got them.

Nigel would catch it.

Yes, from what I understand – and they also make mistakes.

You do need to know all 2 and 3 letter words. After that you cherry pick.

In fact, maybe it's better not to think of them!

Avoid trying to make sense of how to write them based on how they sound seems like a start.

How fast he was able to achieve this is amazing, but you probably can already do this with Chinese characters ( I assume you are from a Latin based language ), and even intuit how radicals combine into a character.

Nope? Not at that pace anyway. At a fast pace for a human, yes, but not at 60x faster than "fast".

You could cheat with computer too

Nigel Richards usually outperforms (and is orders of magnitude faster than, at least for the complicated endgames, if I understand correctly) the best computer Scrabble programs.

mneumonic devices. 'memory palace' techniques. Currently learning spanish using this and it is pretty absurdly effective. Definitely couldn't do 40k words in 9 weeks, but obviously im a rank novice and this dude is a pro. But yeah I've memorized probably 2k words, their meanings, and their idiomatic usages in about 90 days using a program called learncraft spanish that uses mneumonic devices.

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.

What does "perfectly optimized" even mean?

If you're suggesting that a game feels less meaningful because its predisposed towards memorization, I'm not sure that leaves a lot of games left on the proverbial table for you.

Furthermore, there's quite a bit more to Scrabble strategy such as:

- balancing your rack

- the natural RNG from drawing tiles

- time pressure

- anagramming

I guess here's hoping you can start an international tournament of world champions for Snakes and Ladders, or Candyland?

More seriously, perhaps you'd enjoy Fischer Chess.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960

I agree with the parent that many games or sports are more fun to watch or participate in when not over optimized. Whether it’s the metagame, memorizing two letter words, or nailing a perfect serve in tennis or volleyball. It’s not fun for me to watch the very top where it’s so far optimized to have less variability, less serendipity, and less fun. Basketball may be an exception to that. All of this is personal opinion.

scrabble is by no means over optimised; the randomness means every move is different, and single-game upsets (someone beating a much higher ranked player) are very common. what makes a champion is winning over the course of tens of games.

Memorizing the words is necessary but not sufficient, there is still a ton of strategy and interesting dynamics to scrabble beyond the word list. The one that's most interesting to me is that at high level play it starts as imperfect information game but progresses into a perfect information game. At the start your opponent's rack could have anything, but once the bag is mostly depleted the challenge is not just to find the best scoring play, but to find your best play relative to all your opponents best plays for all possible racks they could have.

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

I thought there's a rule you need to explain the word used when asked.

Being able to explain the word is a common house rule. The official rules only state that the word must be in an agreed upon standard dictionary (plus a few exceptions, like no abbreviations), which is the official Scrabble dictionary for competitions. As long as you can point to it there when challenged, you're good.

Knowing a word and its definition is not the same as using it daily, in writing or verbally.

If I give you eight random letters and ask you to create words with them; if it's in a language that you use daily, you'll first see the ones that you use the most, not the longest/more complicated ones. Whereas if they should be picked from a dictionary, I can see that it could be easier to find long/complicated words, since you won't have a notion of "popular" words.

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.

Actually, the point values should be printed on each tile so they do not have to be memorized, though it may help in considering the opponent's responses if they have certain letters that combine with yours.

And it's also acceptable to have a pre-printed scoresheet where one can track the letters that have been played so that would show the frequency of each.

Tracking helps one a lot at the end as you know what letters your opponent has and can adjust your play to suit. Of course, at most tournament level play, they have been tracking and know your final rack too.

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

Interesting, I wonder if he also memorized all the irregular verb tenses? If so that is a serious feat.

For example, future tense in the 2nd person adds “ás” to the end of the verb. Pensar becomes pensarás. But, there are irregulars. You’d think the verb salir would be salirás (if you were memorizing), but it actually it saldrás

Seems like an incredible feat that goes beyond memorizing a dictionary. Unless Spanish scrabble maybe has specific rules around verb tenses and whatnot?

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.

Ah, makes sense :)

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.

As a person who likes words, this is exactly why I dislike Scrabble. It's right up there with spelling bees.

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

There’s no right way to enjoy words... Whether it’s through playing Scrabble, writing poetry, or diving into etymology

Someone should just make a Scrabble tournament in which the dictionary is just random strings that you just have to memorize

Competitive Scrabble has as much to do with language as competitive Sudoku has to do with mathematics.

Somebody has the huge talent to learn multiple languages and interact with millions on a privileged position, but choose instead to earn the title of "king of scrabble". I'm unsure about if this history is comedy or drama.

My suggestion to this person would be to be much more ambitious with this life. He has the skills.

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.

It's not even really learning the words, just how they are spelled. It's basically just pattern recognition.

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.

Not that I agree or disagree, but they probably think it’s waste of intellect. Like how good will hunting portrays being a janitor a waste of his talents.

Nobody has a right to another’s intellect. It’s totally unreasonable to criticize someone’s life choices like this.

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.

Bit off topic - where can we get free access to the various world scrabble championship games? English especially, but others are good 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/

Sorry, I meant to ask, game data (moves and such). That channel links to this site, https://www.scrabbleplayers.org/tourneys/2024/csw/lxt/11/ Not sure if they have the actual moves. Still looking

That he can do this is amazing. I wonder how he decides to pick up a new language of Scrabble, considering the near decade gap between French and Spanish.

Also, what are the communication rules during play? Does he at least need to know enough Spanish to be able to issue or respond to a challenge?

I'm surprised a bit that nobody here is turning this into a question of where do LLMs lie on the spectrum of "understanding" compared to this.

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.

Spanish, English and French have Latin roots. Whether Nigel knows Latin or not he had likely picked up on those underlying patterns.

A testament to the sheer power of memory, dedication, and pattern recognition

I think we had the same case in France. It is impressive.

how can you memorize all words of a language and still not have command of it? that's a feat in and off itself it seems.

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").

AY CARUMBA!

honestly, the scrabble world would have been a lot more surprised had he not won.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com