New Zealand’s Nigel Richards, 51, has won his fourth Scrabble World Championship after beating American Jesse Day in this year’s final. His very first word went for 100 points.
That word was “zonular” (“like a zone”), but he also scored 84 with “phenolic” and 68 on “groutier”.
His opponent had some big words of his own — scoring 95 for “maledict” (no, not the Doom enemy) — but it wasn’t enough to overcome that 100-point opening, with Richards going on to win the best-of-five final 575 to 452.
The Kiwi takes home £8000 ($14,486) in winnings, ABC News reports.
We’ve actually written about Richards before; he famously won the French Scrabble championships in 2015 without being able to speak a word of French, and incredibly won them again earlier this year.
Here’s how the board looked by the end of it:
Here we have it, the Scrabble World Championship final board.
Some in there you probably wouldn’t see in your average Boxing Day game… pic.twitter.com/x3SGdFSW35
— Caitlin Doherty (@_CaitlinDoherty) October 28, 2018
Comments
3 responses to “Scrabble World Champion Drops 100-Point Word On His First Turn”
Except the photo of the board clearly shows that those three words didn’t all appear in the same game.
It was best of five games, so those words might have been in the other ones.
And that’s why the official Scrabble dictionary has no place in our games. So many bullshit words that no-one ever uses in everyday speech. We just use a mini Collins or some such. Keepin’ it real!
yeah those guys words were dumb and stink, I know heaps more words then those dumb stink guys and stuff