Friday, October 15, 2021

Jerome Gambit: Elephant Perspective

 


I have been reading The Exhilarating Elephant Gambit (2020) by Jakob Aabling-Thomsen and Michael Agermose Jensen. It is quite enjoyable: well-researched, well-written and well laid out.

Although the opening is a defense for Black, 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 d5, I found the following quote to be easily applicable to the Jerome Gambit, 1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.Bxf7+ - You just have to substitute "Black" for "White" to make the transition.

Playing an unusual opening has some general advantages:

We are playing on our turf, whereas White is out of his comfort zone.

The burden of proof is on White to refute our supposedly "unsound" opening. It is one thing to lose with White in a complicated Najdorf Sicilian, but the prospect of losing when you are supposed to be better at move 2 brings with it a whole different type of pressure.

Faced with such a surprise, many players react in one or more of the following ways: becoming either overconfident or playing overly defensively; choosing a second-rate response in the hope of taking you "out of the book"; and/or burning significantly more time than usual in the opening, leading to time pressure later, especially at faster time controls.

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