The Rest of the Rest of the Story

It's hard to think of a graphic that catches the essence of Bill Wall – chess player, author (see "Hip' Kat" and his collections of 300 or 500 miniature games, collected by opening), chess populiser and all around good guy. I settled for what is on the left, as Bill is always cooking up something with his openings surprises.

In a recent email, Bill told me that there is a PGN file at Chess.com that contains 40 years of his games: 29,935 games,1969 – 2009. Readers interested in tricky, trappy, goofy and fun openings (often leading to quick victories), should take the time to download the file.

Bill expressed a bit of his philosophy of play

Have fun going through the trash (my games). You will find the most unorthodox, wierdest, awfulest, off-the-wall chess openings there (isn't that great). Any opening can be played as long as you know it better than the other guy and don't fall for a trap before the other guy does...

I see someone has added a wiki on me at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Wall so there is hope with patzers who play chess traps all the time.

I downloaded and examined the file, and found – among many over-the-top games – what may be the answer to a question in an earlier post, "The rest of the story...?" Back then, Bill had shared part of one of his Jerome Gambit games, but had hazily noted after 16 1/2 moves that the game was "later drawn."

Actually, and not surprisingly, his opponent immediately blundered and Bill won in 18 moves: Wall,B - Guest4395, Internet, 2001, 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.Bxf7+ Kxf7 5.Nxe5+ Nxe5 6.Qh5+ Ng6 7.Qxc5 d6 8.Qd5+ Ke7 9.d3 c6 10.Bg5+ Nf6 11.Bxf6+ Kxf6 12.Qb3 Rf8 13.0-0 Kg5 14.Nd2 Kh6 15.Nf3 Qf6 16.Rae1 Be6 17.Qxb7 Bc8 18.Qxa8 Black resigned

I'll pass along a few more of Bill's Jerome Gambits in a later post.