The Return of Jerome Gambit for Dummies (Part 2)

Building on yesterday's initial exploration into The Database, "[l]ooking for the 'essence' of the Jerome Gambit (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.Bxf7+), or at least an insight into how it 'works', " I checked and found 23 games where White had won in 5 moves.

How do you win with White in the Jerome Gambit in 5 moves??  

The following game held the answer

mediax - jemasc
Jerome Gambit Thematic Tournament
ChessWorld, 2008
1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.Bxf7+ Kxf7 5.Nxe5+ White claimed a win on time

Ah, yes, the "The-Clock-Is-My-Friend" motif. (Or the "My-Opponent-Lost-Interest-In-The-Game" dynamic; or the "My-Opponent-Is-Playing-Too-Many-Games-At-Once-And-Decided-To-Give-This-One-Up" strategy.)

Admittedly, that was not very enlightening.

More interesting was the question: How does White lose in 5 moves, as he did 34 times in The Database?

Again, time was a factor in many of the games, but half of White's 5-move losses went like this

Kaarvek - LuigiBot
standard. FICS, 2011
1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.Bxf7+ Kxf7 5.Ng5+

with White resigning before or after 5...Qxg5.

This was the first non-trivial finding of my research, but it came with a serious caveat.

It turned out that when I did a search in The Database for games that had the position after White's 5th move, I found 379 of them, averaging 24 moves in length, with the longest (a win for Black) lasting 91 moves.

On top of that, White won 81 of the games, and 9 were drawn, for a score of 23% for the first player.

My conclusion (more proof that the Jerome Gambit can lead to strange chess): [theoretical] Do not play 5.Ng5+ because it loses a piece, and [practical] it cuts White's scoring percentage in half.