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Ok, without going too deeply into the philosophy, sociology, and literary criticism of it all, giving 2.b3 the name of Robert Snyder just seems wrong.
As someone else pointed out, Czerniak made a study of the line, and it's been known for decades before Snyder played and taught it. His main claim to the name is that he has encouraged some of his students to play it. The only reason he may get away with it is that 2.b3 is so obscure that nobody will really challenge it. Let's challenge it.
Let's change the name of this thread to either "1.e4 c5 2.b3" or the "Czerniak Variation of the Closed Sicilian". ChessPub has a fair amount of influence on opening names, as certain people in the BDG threads have discovered. Let's use that influence for good causes!
Well, Snyder did write the first book 'The Snyder Sicilian' (or rather pamphlet as it wasn't very thick) on 2.b3 in the late 1970s.
But names tend to change as new players take over, and the last decade the main proponent is GM Tamaz Gelashvili who seems to be playing it whenever he gets the chance...
So imo The Gelashvili Variation would be well earned, just look at the links below!
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=49264 http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1170580 The problem is not really Snyder's name on the variation (though I can't say I like it as it means something in danish...) but rather the english language and culture dominating the world and pushing the names of English and American players.
So, in the future I suppose 2.b3 might become 'the Short variation' instead, as Nigel has played it a handful of times against players he should beat anyway, ratingwise...
An example of this would be e.g. Andrew Martin's articles on 2.b3 at chessville, focusing on a game by Short and with some other english players mentioned in the side notes - neither Gelashvili or Czerniak are mentioned...
http://www.chessville.com/instruction/Openings/Martin/Index.htm The articles are quite nice and instructive for those who wish to try out 2.b3, and I don't think Martin deliberately tried to diminish the influence of Gelashvili or Czerniak or anyone else. It's quite understandable that when taking a quick look at an interesting system, you tend to notice the names of people you know or have met, or at least you know their approximate playing strength, or stories about them etc etc...
Had these articles been written by e.g. a russian GM, quite different names would surely have been featured...
The problem is more that almost everybody understands english nowadays but the majority of chess articles at the big sites and magazines & books etc are written by native speakers, who naturally will be writing for an audience of native speakers while the real audience is chess players in the whole world...
- But of course, it wouldn't hurt if writers were aware of this cultural bias when writing. One recent nice thing in this respect is that Chesscafe.com has recruited Stefan Bücker for a monthly article. At least it's a step in the right direction...
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The Snyder variation (Read 23037 times)
