Petrosianic: Naming conventions are a subject all their own.
Like how many openings have multiple names:
Ruy Lopez/Spanish Game
Center Counter Defense/Scandanavian Defense
Greco Counter Gambit/Latvian Gambit
Petroff Defense/Russian Defense
Part of the fuss over the Batsford rewrite of My 60 Memorable Games had them even changing the names Bobby had used for openings, with things like "Hyper-Accelerated Fianchetto"
One of the biggest openings today, the Catalan should really be called the Tartakover Opening. Tartakover invented it at the request of the Barcelona 1929 organizers, who wanted an opening to put the region's name on. Nice of him to do so, considering there isn't one with his own name on it. He originated another line after a trip to the zoo, and called it the Orang-Utan, so what do you do with a guy like that?
<Yes, I recall some discussion concerning why 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 e6 3.c4 is the Kramnik variation when he only played it once, in a rapid game, while already Alekhine and Tartakower played it several times in tournaments.>
For that matter, Alekhine wasn't the first to play Alekhine's Defense, he's just the one who brought it to prominence. CH Stanley first played the Morphy Defense to the Ruy Lopez in his match with Rousseau, but Morphy is the one who understood the principles behind it and made it work. (Stanley's idea was an immediate b5, while Morphy knew to keep that in reserve).
Mednis has a major beef in <How to Beat Bobby Fischer> about openings not being named after Fischer. He even gripes in a Fischer-Keres game about how Keres invents a variation and it's called the Keres Variation, but Fischer doesn't get his name on anything. He wanted the Poisoned Pawn Variation and 6. Bc4 against the Najdorf named after him. But the joke is that he gave them really awkward names (in Descriptive Notation, no less!) that would never have caught on. He'd wanted the Poisoned Pawn to be called "Fischer's QNP", and the other to be called "Fischer's 6. B-QB4".
I'd always meant to write to him and say that the first should really be called "Fischer's OPPONENT'S QNP" (an even MORE awkward name!). Fischer didn't invent the opening, of course. It was played several times in the 50's, most notably by Tolush, who lost a famous game to Tal and won a not-so-famous game against Korchnoi with it. Fischer is the one who brought it to prominence, of course, but I'm not sure how prominent it was until 1972. He didn't play it very often, and Spassky was the first big name player he'd played it against. He'd played it 3 times against Bruno Parma, and a couple of other games against non-GM's, but that was it. It was Game 11 of the 1972 match that really put the variation on the map.
Kibitzing
