I was very good at competitions, but terrible at rote memorization, including memorizing algorithms and matching them to particular problems. I'd just create the algorithms on the fly. E.g. I was presented with a maze solving problem, never had read about maze solving before, and just created my own version of it.
It's easy to make generalizations that minimize or downplay some of these things. But it's no more knowledge then the original study on too little data was.