"Despite the documented evidence of chess historian H.J.R. Murray, I have always thought that chess was invented by a goddess." George Koltanowski, from Women in Chess, Players of the Modern Game
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Thursday, August 14, 2008
The Giuoco Piano a/k/a C50 in ECO Terms
Hola darlings!
Rick Kennedy, one of the three people who read my Chessville column every month emailed me a little while back and something I wrote back to him (for the life of me, I have no idea what), triggered a brilliant idea in his mind to write about whether/if, etc. chess femmes play something called Jerome's Gambit.
I had a vague idea that it must have something to do with chess but for some unknown reason "go fish" pops into my mind whenever I read the words "Jerome's Gambit." The other thing "Jerome's Gambit" conjures up is a memory from my murky past long long ago, on a planet far far away...of a street hustler named Boney Jerome who used to hold court on the steps outside the apartment building where I lived at the time. Boney Jerome tried to lure me into an "unspecified relationship" by attempting to bribe me with large gold and cubic zirconia rings (the gold was probably as fake as the stones), which I always rejected with a sweet smile. He eventually gave up on me, declaiming to all in the neighborhood that I was way too smart and sassy-mouthed for my own good, always throwing quotes from Shakespeare at him. For my part, I was impressed that Boney Jerome knew the name Shakespeare.
I digress. Today Rick did write about chess femmes and the Jerome at his blog entirely devoted to the Jerome Gambit, and now I actually understand it's a series of moves at the beginning of a chess game that starts out e4/e5, Nf3/Nc6, and has nothing to do with fishing, the card game "go fish" or street hustlers. Well, darling, why didn't you just say so to begin with?
After doing a little research, I found a database at Chessgames.com where this opening sequence of moves is not called the Jerome's Gambit but is called something like Guicci's Piano, only it's not Guicci the designer, it's some Italian guy who played chess ages ago or maybe he didn't really play, he just wrote about chess like I do, but he managed to get something named after himself like any good designer should. It seems Jerome's Gambit is an offshoot of Guicci - a Chinese knock-off, one could say.
The first game recorded under the ECO "C50" is from the 1600s! Cool!
As per usual there aren't a lot of games by chess femmes, but there are enough to show that they do play the Piano.
As Lasker wrote "... The artistic conscience sometimes makes him who has it a coward – or, let us say, a Hamlet of the chess board.
ReplyDelete"I wonder if Hamlet was a chessplayer. From his character it seems indeed likely. If he was, he probably played a weak but imaginative game, with a craving to improve upon the best move and therefore often missing it.
"Hamlets of the chess board are frequent types. Once in the meshes of combination they lose themselves in its intricacies, and evolve ideas that are so infinitely subtle that they have no vitality. Then is the moment when fate, usually with a somewhat brutal, matter-of-fact blow, wakes them out of their dreams."
What this has to do with "go fish", I am not sure.