Not (Yet) the Jerome Gambit

In 1988 (20 years before this blog began, and more than a dozen years before my fascination with the Jerome Gambit), Caissa Editions published The Marshall Gambit in the French and Sicilian Defenses, by Rick Kennedy (that's me) and Riley Sheffield, with an Introduction by openings explorer Hugh E. Myers. (The title was previously briefly mentioned on this blog about 10 times.)

The book focused on two lines of play for Black, 1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.Nc3 c5!? and 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 e6 3.d4 d5!?.

Much of the research within those pages came from visits to the White Collection in the Cleveland Public Library - the largest publicly accessible collection of chess items in the world.

That investigating was productive - and, largely, necessary, as at that time commercial chess game databases had hardly appeared: ChessBase 1, for the Atari ST computer, came out in 1987; and ChessBase 2, for the PC running DOS, came out a year later. (ChessBase for Windows appeared in 1994.)

Relatedly, Fritz 1 (named Knightstalker in the US), an analysis and playing chess engine, appeared as an MS-DOS program in 1991. 

In preparing the book manuscript, Riley and I also put together a chapter on a "reversed Marshall Gambit", 1.e4 e6 2.d4 d5 3.exd5 exd5 4.c4, but eventually decided to leave it out when the book went to press, as it was incomplete.

(One variation of the "reversed", coming out of the Queen's Gambit Accepted, is as old as the Göttingen manuscript of 1490, i.e. 1.d4 d5 2.c4 dxc4 3.e3 e5 4.Bxc4 exd4 5.exd4) 

In any event, today's blog post was inspired by the recent appearance of The Exchange French: The Monte Carlo Variation in Theory & Practice by Vladimir Okhotnik (Russell Enterprises).

(The Exchange French Comes to Life by Alex Fishbein [2021] had a dozen pages on what the author called the Miezis Variation, after Grandmaster Normunds Miezis, who has played it over 250 times, coming out of the English Opening, i.e. 1.c4 e6 2.e4 d5 3.exd5 exd5 4.d4)  

Any day now, the post will deliver Okhotnik's book, and a small part of my chess life will have come full circle.