First of all, "w" is for a wildcard search, so you need wildcards in the search parameters. If you don't want a wildcard search, use "s" instead, as the help file shows.

If your text file starts with the nick and then a space and $3 == the nick, you can use:

Code:
if ($read(file.txt,s,$3 $+ $chr(32)) {
  do whatever
}


Note that I include the space -- $chr(32) -- in that because otherwise it will run into problems with two nicks that are similar (such as Super and Superman... if you look for Super, and Superman is first in the text file, it would stop there... with the space, it won't stop at the wrong one).