In other words, practice, practice, practice . . .

Psychologists compare the mental abilities of Scrabble and crossword champions by Christian Jarrett. Normal caveats for all things related to psychology. Looking at Scrabble players and Crossword puzzle players, the researchers discovered to their surprise that there were

no group differences on any of the measures of visuospatial and verbal working memory. However, in line with predictions, the crossword competitors outperformed the Scrabble players on an analogies-based word task - identifying a pair of words that have the same relation to each other as a target pair - and the crossworders also had higher (self-reported) verbal SAT scores than the Scrabble players (SAT is a standardised school test used in the US).

This is the part that I found more interesting though.

Both expert groups far outperformed a control group of high-achieving students on all measures of verbal and visuospatial working memory. This was despite the fact the students had similar verbal SAT levels to the expert players. So it seems the elite players of both games have highly superior working memory relative to controls, but this enhancement is not tailored to their different games.

Given the same raw talent (verbal IQ via SAT), the experts were expert through practice rather than talent per se.