The Return of Jerome Gambit for Dummies (Part 1)

Looking for the "essence" of the Jerome Gambit (1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.Bxf7+), or at least an insight into how it "works" – still pondering IM Gary Lane's challenge to identify some good, representative modern examples – I decided to turn to The Database.

Searching by position after the first 4 moves, I found about 8,780 games (admittedly missing those games that transpose later), which I then sorted by length (number of moves).

I began by examining the shorter games.

Not only did I find the elegant 1998 game between Yvonne Brescak and Stephanie Hefti, but I also found the quintessential Jerome (and four more with identical moves, but different players)

Carlos Azcarate - jemasc
Jerome Gambit Thematic, ChessWorld, 2008
1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.Bxf7+ 1-0

What could be simpler?

Unfortunately, I also found three games that went like this

flplayboy - parrot
standard, FICS, 2007
1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.Bxf7+ 0-1

Worse, there were 28 games that went like this

one-eye bishop - blackburne
ChessWorld, 2004
1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bc4 Bc5 4.Bxf7+ Kxf7 0-1

Obviously I was going to have to dig deeper!