Friday, January 13, 2023

Jerome Gambit: What Is This Garbage?




Here is a link to a Jerome Gambit video by International Master Eric Rosen titled "Jerome Gambit Gone Wrong (kind of)". 

About a year and a half ago ("Jerome Gambit: Recent Videos") I posted the link, but without the title of the video, just the url.

By the way, "Jerome Gambit: What Is This Garbage?" is also the name of a light-hearted post from little over a year ago.

And if you search this blog for other examples of the word "garbage" you are likely to run into the post "Jerome Gambit: First There Is The Confusion Factor" which has this sage reflection
I am reading IM Sam Collins' Gambit Busters (Everyman Chess, 2010) with a know-your-enemy focus, and enjoyed the following, from the chapter "Escaping the Defensive Mindset"
It is well known that club players, typically, go to pieces when confronted by a gambit. Of course, for every player there are some gambit lines which they know, and perhaps their theoretical knowledge will suffice to get them to a safe position. But this won't be the case when they are confronted by an established gambit they don't know, an unusual or forgotten gambit, or where their opponent deviates from theory.  
To my mind, gambits are the situations where there is the single biggest gap between passively looking at a position at home, and facing something over the board. Skimming over an opening variation with a cup of tea, maybe Rybka muttering in the background, it all looks so straightforward - an "=" symbol (or something even more favourable), a bunch of crisp responses demonstrating the intellectual failure of our opponent's adventure. 
But at the board, things are rather different. First, there is the confusion factor...

No comments: