Jerome Gambit: Practical Underpromotion

 

Visiting Tim Krabbé's "Open Chess Diary" website, I was intrigued by his "Practical Underpromotion" post 

In 1912, in The Theory of Pawn Promotion, Alain White wrote that he had 'never heard of a game where victory was won by a promotion to Rook or Bishop'. In 1936 the great endgame connoisseur Harold Lommer wrote something to that effect too. In my own Chess Curiosities (1985) I mentioned the 'extreme rareness of such promotions', and quoted 12 examples from all of chess history, including trivial ones. Ten years later Harold van der Heijden, in his Pawn Promotion, extended the list to 27. We had entered the database era - he had used a 400,000 game one. Over the following two years, in the magazine EBUR, he showed some 15 new cases. My turn again - in the meantime the databases have grown to almost 2,000,000 games, and if I used the same criteria as in 1985, I could show over 60 examples now.

And what of the world of the Jerome Gambit (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.Bxf7+) ?

Checking with The Database, which contains over 63,500 games, I discovered 60 games that ended with either White or Black promoting a pawn to a Queen, giving checkmate.

I discovered 7 games that ended with the promotion of a pawn to a Rook, giving checkmate - although in each case promotion to a Queen would have been equally effective.

While I did not find a game that ended with a pawn promotion to a Bishop, I did find the following Jerome Gambit game

Mafiyah - AnderssenA, blitz, FICS, 2018 

White is not having a good day, down a couple of pieces, and things are about to turn even worse

22...Ng3+ 23.Kh2 Nxf1+ 24.Kh1 Ng3+ 25.Kh2 f1/N checkmate

A small gift to the spirit of Alain White, whose White Collection in the Cleveland Public Library is one of the largest publicly-accessible chess collections in the world.