“Be not afraid of greatness.…”

For those of us brought up on the IT Crowd, thinking that street countdown and “overnumerousness” (21 points) was the rawest form of word play, let me introduce you to Newzealander (25 points) Nigel Richards.
Nigel is one of the best players of any championship in the world today. The fact that the championships he competes in is Scrabble tournaments is neither here nor there, as Richards has beaten nearly every opponent that has been put in front of him, but as a competitor isn’t that all you can do?

Now “non-sports” people get some stick even though they are all conquering. Phil Taylor, the one of a kind domiant darts player, Pete Weber, the 5 time US ten pin bowling champion who directed his anger/joyousness (20 points) at a child, and Kurt Angle, one of the greatest wrestlers of all time spring to mind. Ok that last one may not be a great example as rassling is fake, but he won the freaking gold medal at the 1996 Olympics with a broken neck, so he was decent.

Just to prove how good a competitor Nigel would become here’s an anecdote about him:
“In a game in 1998, then-newcomer Richards had a rack of CDHLRN? (“?” denotes a blank tile). There was an E available on the board; Richards could have played CHILDREN for a bingo and a 50-point bonus. Instead, Richards played through two disconnected Os and an E. The word? The 10-letter CHLORODYNE.” Source
This is Gary Kasparov level’s of fuckery.

By 2014, Richards had held the first or second ranking in North America for 12 years and going into the 2014 Scrabble North American Championship (26 points), the points he held being at being number one were a difference from the second placed player to the fifteenth placed player. In essence he could have lost a fair few games/not bothered turning up and still been number one for a while.
From between September 2002 to August 2019, Richards has never been ranked lower than number 3 in the world, spending at least 106 months ranked as the number one competitor during that time.

I did the maths drunk, but I think he spent 106 months out of 204 months as world number one across a 17 year period and since 2017 he has been ranked second or third, so you know he’s enjoying that sweet success of scrabble fame and that has affected (17 points) his game.

Nigel Richards, seen here at a Scrabble tournament last winter, won the French-language Scrabble championships Monday. He began studying the French Scrabble dictionary in May.

Now you would think that English words are easy, once you’ve seen one you’ve seen them all. Maybe this thought was going through Richards mind when he entered the French World Scrabble Championships.
Nine weeks before the tournament (12 points), Richards started studying the French dictionary and despite not bothering to learn the language, won the championship. The guy couldn’t order a Café au lait but still beat anyone that was put in front of him. If there’s nothing more inspirational yet lazy, I’m yet to find it. A 14 year old me being told to conjugate (19 Points) verbs in French would have had a poster of him on me wall!