Alonzo Wheeler Jerome: How Strong?

 

I recently was asked how strong a player Alonzo Wheeler Jerome, of the Jerome Gambit (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.Bxf7+), was.

Finding an answer is a challenge.

Jerome lived 1834 - 1902, well before rating systems such as those devised by Harkness and Elo.

The first official use of the term "grandmaster", for example, was in the 1907 Ostend tournament.

On the other hand, from much earlier on the term "master" was freely and casually applied to players who were impressive in one way or another.

Official recognition as "master" by a particular chess body - say, the German Chess Federation - came only in the last quarter of the 19th century and had criteria which would exclude Alonzo Jerome.

Although some statisticians have looked at historical chess players to estimate their strength, Alonzo Jerome is handicapped by not being a very significant figure (outside of this blog, that is). For example, Jeff Sonas' Chessmetrics work looks at 13,000 chess players, but does not include Jerome.

The Edo Historical Chess Rating System does not list Alonzo Jerome, either.

Closer to home, the Database includes 27 games played by Alonzo Jerome, drawn from newspaper and magazine accounts of play. Of those, only 9 appear to be over-the-board encounters: 4 wins, 3 losses, 2 draws. 

Jerome scored 2 wins, 1 loss, and 1 draw against Professor Orestes Augustus Brownson, whose life is documented in three volumes (1, 2 & 3) - none of which cover Brownson's chess. We are left with the Dubuque Daily Herald's 1892 bright but breezy reflection upon Brownson

His keen mental faculties found particularly agreeable employment at times in the intricacies of chess at which king's pastime he had few superiors in the country. 

Jerome had 1 loss and 1 draw against William A. Shinkman, the "Wizard of Grand Rapids".

In assessing Alonzo Jerome, we are left with a comment by J. W. Miller, the chess editor of the Pittsburgh Chronicle-Telegraph chess column (previously of the Cincinatti Commercial Gazette; also with William Cook, Synopsis of Chess Openings, A Tabular Analysis,With American Inventions in The Chess Opening and Fresh Analysis Since 1882) 

In Cincinnati we met a number of players in the Mercantile  Library… We also had the pleasure of contesting several games with Mr. Jerome, of Paxton, Ill. He is well known as the author of the so-called Jerome Gambit, in which white sacrifices the Bishop by taking KBP on the fourth move of the Giuoco Piano game. Neither the gambit nor its author proved strong in the contest.

If the Edo rating given for J. W. Miller, 1956, is accurate, then Alonzo Wheeler Jerome probably was of average club player strength for his time period - the kind of guy, after all, who would play the Jerome Gambit.