Monday, January 25, 2021

Jerome Gambit: Extremely Rare



Stumbling onto the simplifychess website, I discovered the following entry for the Jerome Gambit

The Giuoco Piano: Jerome gambit is extremely rare and occurs in less than 1 in 10,000 games. From the data, you can expect that White will only have a 39.13% chance of winning, while Black should have a very high 60.87% chance of winning. Since most players have probably never seen this opening and because White has such a low expected chance of winning, it may be well worth it to keep this variation in your back pocket. If you are Black you should have a significant edge and will probably catch your opponent off guard.

Fascinating

I do not know the reference database for the above statistics, but I checked my Big Database (2016) and there were 10 Jerome Gambits out of 6,466,290 games: 0.00000154648, far less common than the above, by an order of magnitude. On the other hand, White scored 3 - 5 -2, which is 40%, very much in tune with the above.

No wonder the Jerome Gambit often surprises the defender.

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