At a small table in a quiet room in a harness racing club in Perth, Western Australia, a softly spoken man with a talent for anagrams spells out the word “felty” in small plastic tiles on a game board. In another room, 20 metres away, the crowd erupts.

The player is 32-year-old Wellington Jighere, from Nigeria, who beat 129 competitors to win the World English-language Scrabble Players’ Association championship on Sunday, defeating Englishman Lewis MacKay with four straight wins in the best-of-seven final round.

Players had begun arriving at Gloucester Park shortly after 8am. Wearing shirts with slogans such as “It’s your word against mine” and “Triple nerd score”, they file upstairs to one of the long function rooms where rows of numbered tables have been set up, each bearing two Scrabble boards and two timers. Most competitors are older women and young – or at least younger – men. Everyone is either a player or an official, except me.

A few people introduce themselves, assuming I’m a player they somehow missed in the previous four days of competition. One woman pauses and, still shaking my hand, looks at her friend. “Calla. Is that a Scrabble word?” she asks.

“It is,” the friend confirms. “Seven points.”

A player named Anderina McLean, from New Zealand, explains this is normal. “People meet you and say, ‘Anderina. Any good scrabble words in that?’”

McLean is here to compete in the open tournament, which has been running alongside the championship rounds since Wednesday. Sunday’s round is an all-in: competitors play eight games and are ranked according to the total of their winning or losing margins. The championship rounds, with the exception of the final, finished on Saturday, so a number of championship players join the open pool. Among them is Nigel Richards, the highest-scoring Scrabble player of all time.

In July Richards won the francophone world Scrabble championships despite not being able to speak more than a few words of French, having memorised the French Scrabble dictionary in nine weeks.

Richards is something of a god in Scrabble circles. Quiet, unfailingly polite and shy of media attention (he politely declined an interview with Guardian Australia) Richards, with his maroon shirt and lanyard fastened high around his neck, is cited as an exception to every rule. Everyone gets nervous in championship rounds, except Richards. Not everyone can do well in every game, but Richards can.

Except in this world championship, in which he placed eighth. For almost any other player, that would be a good result but this was not his week – he later placed 12th in the open. Asked if he’d had a good week, Richards smiled and replied, “I’ve played a lot of Scrabble.”

The first player to meet Richards in the open round on Sunday is Western Australian woman Carolyn Watt, who confesses that her legs shook for most of the game.

“That was a bit of a shock to draw Nigel first up,” Watt says. “He played a couple of words that I wasn’t sure of and I thought I couldn’t dare challenge him.”

She did challenge his use of “frondage” (13 points) but lost, forfeiting five points in the process. Richards won by 140 points. Watt tells me after the match that the margin would have been lower if she had been able to play her own 14-point word, “sexiest”. Unfortunately, Richards spotted the gap.

“He blocked me down,” Watt says. “I had ‘sexiest’ in my rack at the end of the game and he knew it. He said, ‘You’ve got the sexiest rack there.’”

The word Richards used to block “sexiest” was “wuz,” as in “Nigel wuz here”. It was one of 6,500 new words added this year to the Collins Dictionary, the official guide to Scrabble play.

Another newly added word was “cobloaves” (16 points). Joanne Craig, a championship player from New Zealand who took it upon herself to teach me the basics of the game, lists it as the most interesting word of the tournament. It was, of course, played by Richards.

Craig bested Richards in their tournament match, qualifying her for the most exclusive T-shirt of the Scrabble circuit, which proclaims “I beat Nigel”.

A board showing the championship game between Wellington Jighere and Lewis Mackay. Photograph: Calla Wahlquist/The Guardian

Despite playing for New Zealand, Craig lives in Sydney. She trains by playing once a week against Australian team member Esther Perrins, who placed third in the championship.

We head across to the neighbouring function room, where a large, upright scrabble board is standing on an easel. Most tournaments in recent years have used a digital display board that updates automatically to show the championship game, while a live video stream shows the players. Neither of those options is available at the Perth trotting club, so the organisers have gone low-tech, with magnetised Scrabble tiles and two helpers to replicate the game.

The finalists, Jighere and Mackay, are in another room, hopefully outside shouting distance. One of the supervisors in the room texts the draw and words played to Chris Lipe, a US championship player who takes on the role of commentating, with occasional pauses while autocorrect garbles the letter draws.

The first draw of the final tournament is laid out. D, E, I, L, O, R and T for Mackay, A, L, E, N, V, O and Y for Jighere.

The small crowd of spectators starts piping up with suggestions. There is general consensus that Jighere should play “lenvoy” (12 points), meaning messenger or envoy, and a murmur of approval when he does.

The crowd is decisive about what move each finalist should make. There is a collective groan when Mackay, who suffers from a bad tile draw for all four games in the championship, misses what to some spectators is an apparently obvious opportunity to play “autogeny” (12 points). Instead he plays “you” (six points).

By the start of round four, the crowd, which waxes and wanes depending on the schedule of games in the open tournament next door, has called it for Jighere. Lipe’s My Little Pony figurine, placed on the bar table holding MacKay’s tiles for good luck, does not seem to be doing its job. With an apology to the absent Mackay, Lipe confesses the talisman has a patchy success rate: “I didn’t mean to jinx him but this pony doesn’t have a good track record in finals.”

“Lewis is playing very badly,” one spectator remarks. “He has missed a bingo in each round.”

At this level Scrabble is a numbers game. Few players know, or even care, what each word means, although Canadian Geoffrey Newman, who takes over my training from Craig, says it is helpful to know whether a word is a verb because that means you can add point-harvesting suffixes such as -ing. A bingo, he explains, is a seven plus letter word that garners a lot of points.

Newman got into Scrabble by playing online before eventually joining a club, a common path for the younger players. He shows me Zyzzyva, an app used by most serious players that is basically just anagram strength training. “It’s like flashcards,” he says. “It doesn’t even include the meaning, but it says things like if the word can take an ’s’ at the end.”

Perhaps that’s why so many of the words in the last game of the finals look like nonsense. Mackay begins with “guiro” (a percussion instrument made from a hollow gourd, six points) while Jighere plays “aah” (also six points) alongside, creating three two-letter words – “ai,” “ar” and “ho” – worth a combined nine points. They are defined, in turn, as a shaggy-coated slow-moving animal of South America, the letter R, and an offensive derogatory word for a woman, although the last can also take an alternative meaning as another word for “halt”.

Throughout the game 43 words are formed on the board, at least half of which to the untrained eye are just sounds: jai, mho, ye, oe, gi, ur, ed, en, de, ene and deg all made the cut.

Mackay finishes with “neg”, but it’s not enough to beat Jighere, who wins the final game 449 points to 432.

After accepting the congratulations of the spectator room Jighere walks into the open tournament where his team-mates are competing and the orderly proceedings are broken by the shy winner’s thumbs-up. The clinking of Scrabble tiles and soft murmur of voices are briefly replaced by joyful whooping as four other Nigerian players throw back their seats to ran and hug Jighere, and the room breaks into applause.

Speaking to Guardian Australia after his win, Jighere says he has undergone fatigue training to mitigate the effects of jetlag, and forgone employment for the past four months to prepare for the championship.

Combating nerves and fatigue were the main objectives of the new world champion, who had previously played in two other world championships, placing third in Mumbai in 2007 and 11th in Malaysia in 2009. He was sponsored by the Nigerian government to come to Perth and expects a hero’s welcome on his return. He’ll be bringing home a $10,000 cash prize.

“It is the first time that an African has won in these world championships so I have to go and celebrate with them,” Jighere says.

“Nigel is still the master. It just happens that today was my day.”