Rematch!

I admit that I had a lot of fun in that 3 minute (or less) Jerome Gambit (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.Bxf7+) game against the chess engine in Maurice Ashley Teaches Chess (see "A Bagatelle") – enough that I found time today to have a rematch game. After all, I was lucky to make "the second to last mistake" the first time, and was otherwise able to match MATC blunder-for-blunder...

Kennedy - MATC
blitz 2008

1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.Bxf7+ Kxf7 5.Nxe5+ Nxe5 6.Qh5+ Ke6

Again my opponent runs its King to the center to hang onto material.

7.Qf5+ Kd6 8.f4 Qh4+


An improvement over the previous 8...b5?

This move has cause me lots of trouble in the past. See "Jerome Gambit Tournament: Chapter XVI" for a list of posts on the topic.

9.g3 Nf3+

Oh, boy! MATC plays one of the nastier (but more complicated) refutations of the Jerome Gambit.

10.Kd1 Qxg3+

Huh??

What is this?

Let us pause for a moment to answer an existential question: how do you make a chess computer play "weak" chess? Well, I guess you can limit the time it spends in its calculation – or you can program it to make a really bad move every once in a while. It looks like that's what we've got here.

Our game continued another 32 moves, and ended in mate with two Queens (both mine). There's no need to report any further on the battle, except to say that after a reasonable defense, Black threw away a whole Rook on move 31 – more evidence of some kind of blunder factor.

I don't feel the need for a re-rematch.