From my point of view, what happened with the multiplication table was practice without memorization, while the word lists were memorization without practice. Two different approaches to learning with two different outcomes.
Oh, absolutely, you learned it through practice instead of pure memorization, which overall tends to be a better strategy. But just like chess masters tend to mostly learn game positions (through practice, note trying to do rote memorization) and not some advanced logic, I am pretty sure you learned the specific results and did not learn some subconscious algorithm deeper than "lookup 9*5 in the stored table".