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top three nations with elite scrabble players on the wespa ratings list. nigeria is on top, despite constant travel visa rejections to play in world tournaments. 




besides nigeria, countries like kenya, ghana and uganda also contribute players to the world top 100. 




an even more astonishing picture of african performance unfolds when we look beyond the english-speaking african countries. 




scrabble in french? 




in 2015, nigel richards, an english-speaking professional scrabble player from new zealand, confirmed his reputation as perhaps the greatest scrabble player in history by winning the french world scrabble championship, after memorizing the french dictionary in nine weeks. his goal in 2015 was apparently to hold both the english and french world championships simultaneously. he was robbed of his full glory by the nigerian wellington jighere in the english version, but managed to pull off a more phenomenal victory in the language he does not speak! 




nigel richards is said to have an authentic photographic memory . 




what caught my eye in all the frenzied media reports was the name of the person richards defeated in the finals (i was fully expecting a french name): schelick rekawe. an african (from gabon) had reached the finals of the french world championships? how? 




when i looked into the history of the french scrabble world championships, i was stunned to find that francophone african countries have been even more dominant in french scrabble, and over a longer period, than nigerians have become in english scrabble, despite a very active expert scrabble club culture in france and other native french-speaking countries. 




the full list of the top players in the 2015 french scrabble championship that richards won gives a clear picture of this african dominance: 2015 french world championships final standings. source: french wikipedia 




a look at gabon<u+2019>s demographics makes the scrabble achievement of gabon impossible to explain under the present racial hypothesis. 




gabon has a population of 1.7 million and a reported national iq of 64. 




if the world champion needs an iq of just 140 (it should probably be higher than that, given the level of gender disparity at the very top), then there is statistically no one in gabon who should ever come anywhere close to the world championship. three made it to the top 10 in 2015. 




note that the strongest version of the genetic hypothesis is contradicted even before you do the math: the very existence of such high interest in a mathematical game can not be predicted from a genetic theory that claims heritability of (cognitive or other) human interests, if it is indeed true that africans have the lowest genetic endowment in mathematical (or even verbal) ability. 




is french scrabble perhaps less mathematical than english scrabble? not at all. the very fact that someone could successfully cross from english scrabble to french scrabble (nigel richards) should indicate that it requires similar cognitive skills. but i still looked at some profiles of the top french scrabble players in europe just to make sure, and found clear signs to confirm this. for example, the french wikipedia entry on france<u+2019>s best player (the last french player to keep the french world championship from africans, and the only one to have won it twice) says: 




christian coustillas, professeur agr<u+00e9>g<u+00e9> et g<u+00e9>nie des math<u+00e9>matiques, est un joueur fran<u+00e7>ais de scrabble. 




i do not know any french, but i can bet that there is the word <u+2018>mathematics<u+2019> somewhere in there and perhaps even an academic career in it! 




in 2016, nigel richards returned to defend his world championship title and this time the africans vowed to keep the crown from him. like the year before richards stole the french championship, the two finalists in 2016 were both africans again; richards was fourth, behind three africans. the french math professor and former world champion, christian coustillas, could not make it to the top ten as more africans dominated the chart: 2016 french world championships final standings. 8 /10 positions are african. source: french wikipedia 




notice that the names of the 2016 top gabonese players are different from the ones in 2015, which defies the probability projections from their population and national iq even further. senegal (population 13 million, iq 76), which has probably had the most success at the world championships historically, achieved this with a literacy rate of only 40%! 




something special about scrabble for africans perhaps? 




the man who won the french world scrabble championship in 2014, julien affaton from benin, also happens to be a top master draughts (checkers) player in his country. this should immediately suggest that whatever he is using to win his scrabble games probably has something in common with what is needed to be a master in checkers, because it is highly improbable to be that exceptional in two different areas that require unrelated skills. 




the question can then be asked: if this is true, then why aren<u+2019>t africans also very good in checkers at the world level, just as they are with scrabble? isn<u+2019>t checkers an even more natural field for africans since it is cheaper to make a checkers set? 




meet baba sy. 




baba sy breaking world record for simultaneous draughts play. 




back in 1960, a draughts expert from france was visiting the french colony of senegal when he decided to watch some of the street games in poor communities after the french settlers had introduced the game to the black natives. he could not believe the accuracy and speed of their calculations, despite their lack of exposure to theory, and he decided to expose one of the stronger players to his homeland of france where there was a strong checkers club culture among the mathematically-inclined elites. to the utter shock of everyone in france, the young senegalese player, baba sy, defeated every single expert in france and instantly achieved national fame by becoming the national champion of france! 




france had once been the most dominant nation in the world of international draughts, before the netherlands (briefly) and then the soviet union (permanently) took this honor from them through the latter<u+2019>s state-sponsored program of monetarily professionalizing chess and checkers careers. with the phenomenal rise of baba sy, the french thought they had the chance of recapturing the world championship from the soviets by using this brilliant talent from one of their colonies. 




baba sy participated in the 1960 world championship tournament and shocked the soviets by coming second in the world, in a variant of draughts he had just been introduced to that was different from his senegalese one. sy was not convinced that there was a human who was better than him at any form of checkers, so he decided to challenge the world champion in a more decisive one-on-one world championship match instead of an open tournament of cumulative points against different players. but by the time this match was supposed to happen, baba sy had gained enough mastery of this standard variant to convincingly demolish the best of the soviets, including their reigning champion and best match play genius at the time, iser kuperman. this made the soviet government reluctant to allow the official world championship match to take place, apparently for fear of the international embarrassment this title loss would cause, given their heavy investment in the game (they had the same fears over bobby fischer in chess). on the day of the match, the soviet champion simply did not show up, and thus began a long contentious diplomatic standoff between the governments of the soviet union and senegal, as the world of international draughts hotly debated who the rightful champion of the world was for many years. it was only fully resolved posthumously for baba sy. list of draughts world champions. source: wikipedia 




again, a person like sy should not exist outside the realm of science fiction if the racial hypothesis is correct. in 1960, senegal<u+2019>s population was 3 million, and iq 76. the population of france was 47 million, and the population of russia was 120 million, with national iqs of 98 and 97, respectively. 




it should be impossible for a senegalese champion to beat just the high school champions of either france or the soviet union. the reason we have never seen a child become world champion in checkers or scrabble (or anything) is probably because their brains are not fully developed (brain development continues to 25 years of age); and yet the racial hypothesis tells us that the fully developed african brains are on average the mental age equivalent of the white 12 year olds. so why do (the smartest of) africans produce world champion level players and the smartest of the white 12 year olds (or even the much more <u+201c>superior<u+201d> 18/19 year olds) never do? 




baba sy was not some freakish anomaly in african draughts. former african colonies of france have continued to offer the biggest challenge to russia<u+2019>s traditional dominance of the game, even though, like scrabble players, most of them still have little access to international tournaments to raise their ratings (the fact that many of them come from lower income communities even by african standards makes it harder for them to obtain travel visas.) in 2015, jean marc ndjofang , a cameroonian player who has migrated to europe, managed to qualify as the challenger to the russian world champion (by defeating everyone else, including other russians), and only came short of ending the iron grip of the russians on the world title through a tie-break, as the two failed to beat each other after seven games of normal classical match play. the 2015 world champion, alexander georgiev, in a heated tournament game against the vice-world champion, jean ndjofang. 




american checkers. 




americans play a different variant of draughts called english checkers or american checkers; the different variants mainly differ on the number of squares on the board. although the game is mostly popular with children in the us, there is a whole world of professional checkers players who also have a clear endowment in mathematical ability. thus, the most famous world champion in the history of american checkers was a distinguished math professor, marion tinsley . (there are now two variants of anglo-american checkers: the normal go-as-you-play or gayp and one called 3-move, in which the first three moves are pre-chosen, to prevent memorized opening plays that increase probabilities of draws). 




after tinsley<u+2019>s indomitable reign, the most dominant english-checkers player in the world became the appropriately named ron king, who won american championships and 12 world championships. at the height of his dominance, ron king faced the biggest challenge of his career from an unknown player named lubabalo kondlo. king was able to retain the title after a grueling match that was later made into a documentary . kondlo happens to be a black man from a very poor area in south africa. ron king is also black, from barbados, and he is known as the muhammad ali of checkers for his <u+201c>trash talking.<u+201d> at the height of his career, king entered the guinness book of world records for playing an unbelievable 350 simultaneous games and winning them all! 




ron king successfully defended his world championship against strong russian players who had shifted to the anglo-saxon checkers, including alexander moiseyev , a grandmaster in three variants of the game. moiseyev, a computer programmer, finally snatched the crown from king in the 3-move variant in 2003. 




incredibly, ron king held on to the world championship of the gayp variant until 2014, when he forfeited it to an italian grandmaster, sergio scarpetta , when he failed to show up for the last four games of the world championship match. south africa<u+2019>s kondlo has continued his quest for the world title; he qualified again to play the world championship match in 2015 in 3-move checkers (after defeating a strong field including scarpetta), but lost the match to the world champion, italian michele borghetti. 




canadian checkers. 




canada also has its variant of checkers. the 2015 canadian champion is a senegalese immigrant, souleymane keita. he defended his title against (a-russian-immigrant-sounding name) vladimir lubarsky. 




in summary, a player from sub-saharan africa was the finalist or world champion of 2015, in international draughts, american checkers, canadian checkers, english scrabble and french scrabble. 




why aren<u+2019>t africans also dominant in chess? 




the simple reason seems to be that, unlike scrabble and checkers, master level chess requires access to a very large body of ever-growing literature in chess theory (even ignoring the difficulty of making homemade chess pieces); it<u+2019>s no longer possible to teach yourself grand master level chess, without memorizing these long chess openings. africans do not have this access to chess materials (which now includes computer programs) for the same reason that they have no access to mathematics text books and other educational materials in schools or public (i would be surprised if even 1 percent of africans have ever seen the word <u+201c>library<u+201d> on a building anywhere; they simply don<u+2019>t exist). chess has become more resource-demanding than any school subject. 




fischer himself decried the increasingly heavy reliance of top-level chess on familiarity with professionally analyzed theoretical opening lines that the soviet chess machine engendered (fischer had to learn russian just to keep up with the countless russian opening analyses), and he ultimately invented a variant of chess (called fischer random chess) that basically rearranges the pieces at the start of a game. but standard chess continues to be the most popular in the world and africans continue facing a training deficit for as long as there are no books there. 




thus when the new york times reported on the incredible grandmaster achievement of an amateur zambian chess player in 2007, their article was revealingly titled <u+201c>zambian with little training stands poised to make history.<u+201d> (by contrast, re women in chess, a 1992 book about the best chess playing female trio in history, was skeptically titled <u+201c>the polgar sisters: genius or training? <u+201d>). 




the resource disadvantage of africa in chess still does not mean, as some racial hypothesis bloggers seem to constantly suggest, that african chess teams relatively perform at a level that <u+201c>confirms<u+201d> their low national iq scores. on the contrary, zambia has a stronger national chess team than either japan or south korea, for example. thus, zambia (population 15 million, national iq 78) quite easily defeated south korea (population 50 million, national iq 106) last time they met at the chess olympiads, with the former not even featuring its grandmaster. (china, on the other hand, is now an east asian chess powerhouse, although it should be mentioned that they achieved this through a semi-soviet-style professionalization program dubbed <u+201c> big dragon project <u+201d>, initiated by an asian billionaire in collaboration with chinese officials, with the explicit aim of raising east asian chess performance). south africa<u+2019>s first chess grandmaster, kenny solomon. 




even within some historically multiracial countries, you can find some hints of anomalies to the racial hypothesis: south africa has produced only one chess grandmaster in its history, and he happens to come from the black community. the fact that the black population of south africa is larger shouldn<u+2019>t really matter; after all, the top swimmers in south africa are all white (for likely genetic reasons), and the fastest runners in white majority multiracial societies are black. 




what about american blacks? 




the vast majority of observations that have led to the conclusions of the racial hypothesis are based on the intellectual performance of blacks in america, where a historical iq gap of one standard deviation seems to be intractable. 




indeed the game of expert scrabble itself appears to confirm the ethnic conclusions of jensen et al within america because black americans perform (on scrabble) exactly as predicted by iq data. top black american experts generally perform lower than white american women at the top expert level. 




the best male native black american scrabble player, marlon hill, has apparently made it his open mission to beat whites at scrabble, a story that has not escaped rush limbaugh <u+2018>s amusement. he has so far failed to convincingly establish his racial <u+201c>superiority.<u+201d> his rating does not appear on the top 1000 players of the world (wespa) or even on the top 100 rated players in north america (naspa). (by contrast, marlon hill<u+2019>s old training partner , sammy okosagah, a nigerian immigrant, has been ranked as high as number one in north america at his peak in 2004, and was one of the highest performing american duo, with david weigand, at the 2013 world championships when he came third in the world.) lisa odom, the highest ranked native black american player. 




quite surprisingly, there are some signs that the well-known gender reversal of intelligence that has been observed in black americans may be slightly confirmed in scrabble. a female black expert, lisa odom, does not appear on the recent international wespa ratings list (although she has qualified in the past to play at the world championships) but she appears on the north american top 100 naspa list . she is presently 59 th on that list (it changes frequently), which makes her not only the highest ranked native black american, but also one of the highest ranked women of any race in north america. (incidentally, the third highest ranked player on the entire north american list at the time of this writing is a kenyan immigrant, patrick gitonga nderitu, who is ranked just above the stanford wonderkid, mack meller.) 




a jewish rule? 




one simple informal test of the <u+201c>g-loadedness<u+201d> or cognitive intensity of any intellectual field is the presence of jewish over-representation at the very top of the game, so to speak. this rule seems to work for the game of scrabble. 




one of the highest rated scrabble players in the world, second only to the great nigel richards in official rating at the time of this writing, is an australian player named david eldar. eldar attended a special school called king david high school, whose wikipedia description sounds like it was exclusively formed to serve the australian jewish community. ashkenazi jews are only 0.5% of that country. although eldar has not yet won the world championship, the odds are highly in his favor, as the second highest rated player in the world. 




someone who has won the world championship is joel sherman, who is one of only three americans to have held the coveted title. even without digging further for more jews on the long list of highly rated players in north america, these examples are already sufficient to establish jewish statistical over-representation on scrabble super-achievement. and we have a strong reason to believe that there are even more. in a 2005 interview where he was asked to confirm his jewish roots after he appeared on a list of jewish sports figures, sherman disclosed: 




<u+2026> several other north american scrabble <u+00ae> champs have been jewish and they<u+2019>re not listed, presumably because the wikipedia contributor who compiled that list found my jewishness mentioned in <u+201c>word freak<u+201d> and the same info is not readily available about them. i won<u+2019>t <u+201c>out<u+201d> them because i don<u+2019>t know how they would feel to share that listing as well. my own feeling is ambivalent: it<u+2019>s nice to be noted, but i<u+2019>d rather my born religion was not the criterion for my inclusion, as i have been an atheist since even before my bar mitzvah<u+2026> 




seven years before sherman<u+2019>s statement, a 1998 new york times report on computers playing scrabble against human experts, contained a revealing sentence in the long article: <u+201c>the leading scrabble players, many of whom are jewish, <u+2026><u+201d> 




the over-representation of ashkenazi jews at the top of such cognitively demanding games might also put in doubt any suggestions of steep declines in real jewish iq in the 20 th century. 




the game of checkers does not escape this jewish rule (no pun intended). i found that the greatest checkers match player in the soviet union at the height of soviet sponsorship of the game, the man the soviets were apparently shielding from senegal<u+2019>s baba sy, iser kuperman, was jewish . this means that the two russians who held the world championship in chess and checkers at this time of soviet dominance were both jewish (the great mikhail botvinik was the chess world champion at this time in the early 1960s). 




it is said that this ambitious soviet promotion and glorification of chess and checkers was originally instituted by stalin to keep the most intelligent elites of his country, especially the jews, occupied with something that would keep them from meddling in politics (in more recent years, gary kasparov, an ashkenazi jew, has indeed become quite troublesome for the russian government after retiring from chess). it was of course also later used for propaganda purposes to convey the intellectual <u+201c>superiority<u+201d> of the soviet system internally and internationally. 




jewish brilliance has not left the world of checkers to this day. alexander moiseyev, the russian who ended the world championship reign (in 3-move american checkers) of the barbadian ron king, is of jewish descent . (the 2015 finalist against senegalese souleymane keita in canadian checkers, vladimir lubarsky, is also almost certainly jewish .) 




the bottom line is that if the cognitive hierarchy under the racial hypothesis was true, there should be no single popular intellectual activity in the world in which africans and ashkenazi jews are both over-represented at the top (just as there is no single world athletic activity requiring high speed, in which the slowest populations and the fastest populations are both over-represented at the top). scrabble and checkers are in violation of that logical axiom. 




jewish over-representation at the top of such games (checkers, scrabble, chess, etc) also puts in doubt any conclusions that the male advantage over females has to do specifically with visuospatial abilities, as jews are not exceptional in that regard. it would seem that the advantage has to just do with general intelligence. 




no east asians in scrabble? national school scrabble championships, source: wikipedia 




east asians have the reputation of being good at math in school and college, but their dominance does not extend to the highest award in math (the field<u+2019>s medal), so it is not an anomaly for scrabble that they are not over-represented at the world championships (especially those born in english-speaking nations). the question still is: why aren<u+2019>t they good at scrabble in school, since they are so conspicuously good in math at that stage? does their failure at this stage pose a problem for scrabble as a math game? 




actually, they do quite as well at scrabble as they do in school mathematics. 




it appears that there has been an east asian name among the winners of the highly competitive national school scrabble championships in four of the last six years! (they are only 6% of the us population). notice that only one female name has appeared (aune mitchell, 2007) even at this stage. i did not investigate the jewishness of the other names, but it would not be surprising if there were a few. first team to win national scrabble school championship twice, andy hoang and erik salgado sat math scores by gender and ethnicity in 2015. source: aei 




discussion 




<u+201c>for expert players, the game requires the simultaneous interplay of verbal, visuospatial, and mathematical abilities under speeded conditions. there are no other games that require the simultaneous, rapid use of all of these abilities.<u+201d> halpern and wai, the world of competitive scrabble , psychology today. 




spearman<u+2019>s hypothesis , an idea used by arthur jensen to demonstrate the biological nature of the black-white performance gap, predicts that the gap should expand the more you use a test that relies on more raw brain power or <u+2018>g<u+2019>. scrabble involves much more mental manipulations than the simpler well-known <u+201c>wordsum<u+201d> vocabulary test and the latter shows a wide gap between blacks and whites (in america). this gap does indeed appear to grow even further when you replace wordsum test with scrabble, but only when you limit <u+201c>black<u+201d> to native black americans. the gap appears to reduce and even reverse when you introduce black africans, which is an anomaly for the racial hypothesis. the fact that we are talking about the most elite players should actually make it even more impossible for this to happen since the black-white gap should be even more conspicuous (in favor of whites) at higher ends of cognitive performance. 




in the same vein, the game of draughts (especially its speeded up form, called <u+201c>blitz draughts<u+201d>) is much more g-loaded than a simple <u+201c> reaction time <u+201d> test that is used by cognitive psychologists to test natural brain power differences by comparing how long it takes one to react to certain simple stimuli. blitz draughts does not only demand your quick reaction to the move of your opponent, it includes the added mental challenge of calculating your reaction move based on assessing a constantly changing position. besides playing the world championship match in the slow classical draughts, an african player reached the top two slots of the super-elite world championships in blitz draughts for both 2015 and 2016 . 




if africans are doing well on these games because of some special environmental reason, then that contradicts the genetic racial hypothesis. if africans in africa are outperforming others due to some environmental reason, then black american performance on scrabble can also be raised by environmental methods; if black american scrabble performance can be raised to equal whites, then black american math performance can also be raised by environmental intervention. if it can<u+2019>t, then the fallacy of the hereditarian position has been to assume that native black americans are cognitively representative of blacks everywhere. 




the global racial hypothesis is therefore not just contradicted by these findings, it is logically refuted . under this hypothesis, there should not be even one single cognitive field where the top blacks are equal or more over-represented than the top whites, especially when white participation in such fields is elite enough to result in a wide gender performance gap in favor of males even with relatively high numbers of female participants. the additional presence of jewish over-representation at the top of a field should only reinforce the impossibility of black dominance or equality under that hypothesis. you have the opposite empirical result in scrabble and checkers since you get increasing african over-representation with rising cognitive selectivity, suggesting a reversal of the gap, if anything. 




the falsifiable part of the racial hypothesis is duly falsified. 




references downie, j. (2011). why are most scrabble champions male? new republic fatsis, s. (2002). word freak: heartbreak, triumph, genius, and obsession in the world of competitive scrabble players. penguin. halpern, d., wai, j. (2007) the world of competitive scrabble: novice and expert differences in visuospatial and verbal abilities . journal of experimental psychology: applied 2007, vol.13 no.2 79-94 lynn, richard (1994). <u+201c>sex differences in intelligence and brain size: a paradox resolved<u+201d>. personality and individual differences . 17 (2): 257<u+2013>71 pinker, s. (2009). the sexual paradox: men, women and the real gender gap . simon and schuster.
scrabble spells doom for the racial hypothesis of intelligence
chanda chisala