About 25 years ago I taught a young lad of about 11 to play chess. Young Lad (YL) had never seen a chess set with his own eyes, and was only aware of chess existing thanks to his exposure to it through media (it came up in a book he had to read for school, for example).
As for the qualities that make a good chess player: good memory, good spatial reasoning, good imagination, etc., I have no idea if he possessed any of them. His much-older sister, who was my friend at the time and introduced me to him, said (not unkindly) that he was a good kid, but generally unremarkable in every way.
So one night I taught YL how to play chess. We did a few practice situations and whatnot, just to make sure he fully understood, then we set up and drew pawns for black or white.
Our first actual game, I could see right away that he understood winning concepts (controlling the center of the board, developing knights & bishops before queen & rooks, etc.), despite never having been exposed to them. I still won.
Our second game, he built on those concepts, and even figured out how to use pins & forks to his advantage (having robbed me of my queen thanks to a well-placed fork), again despite never having been exposed to those concepts. I won, but barely.
Our third game, the kid beat me as thoroughly as Garry Kasparov would beat a patzer. At one point I think he was picking off my pawns just for sport.
Clearly that kid was born with some kind of wiring in his brain that translated into pretty-impressive skills at chess. YL is now an adult man, and his sister tells me that he still plays chess casually from time to time, but no one will play him because he beats them so thoroughly.