Sometimes when we mess around on the soccer field, somebody will dribble by the entire defense, stop the ball in front of the goal, then drop to the ground to head the ball into the goal.  Wow, a diving header!  Who cares.  Likewise, suppose that I get a king plus two pawns against a king, promote my two pawns to queens, sacrifice one of them, and still win the game.  Would this entitle me to claim a brilliant queen sacrifice that resulted in a won game?  Rhetorical question (I am not looking for an answer), but I do wonder if any body has ever tracked the frequency with which queen sacrifices are unnecessary.  That is, the game was won even without it.  In theoretical circles, it is often hard to define causality, but it would seem that we can all agree on a working definition of when the queen sacrifice caused the win, and when it was ostentatious.

Thank you -- brilliant mind's think alike!  And I like that reference to Occam's razor too!

How many true queen sacrifices have you seen in the modern era, say 1970s and after that weren't part of a forced mate which would be recognized as a moderately difficult tactic as opposed to an actual brilliance involving the foresight of an early queen sacrifice?

The first game that came to mind was Tal - Hjartarson, 1987.

The possible queen sac is at the end of the game.

the above post #5 ... is one of the games of the possibility of a queen sacrifice ... but, the sacrifice was not needed to win the game.

If I understand your question correctly, there was a sacrifice of this sort in a fairly recent game (within the last 2 years, I believe).  I don't recall the players or the event involved, unfortunately.  One player sacrificed a queen unusually early, for a positional advantage, rather than a forcing combination.

Anyway, until I remember that game, there's a non-forcing queen sacrifice by Nezhmetdinov:

Wow very nice games there RandomPrecision.

Here's a pretty cool queen sacrifice Ivanchuk played earlier this year in a Rapid match.  I'd post it here as a diagram but I have no idea how to.  I just looked for the game on google and lucky for me someone at chess.com has already blogged about it so check out this link and if someone can post the diagram directly into this thread that would be great.  In fact if someone could tell me how to post a diagram that would be even better.

http://www.chess.com/article/view/spectacular-queen-sacrifice

Yes, interesting topic to bring up and Gonnosuke's invocation of Occam's Razor makes it all the more interesting. But, there are more things to chess (and life) than simplicity. I'd say we should also consider the symmetry of the game and, even, beauty. Einstein said one should make things as simple as possible, but not simpler than that. And that is open to subjective interpretation, maybe? Especially if one desires a beautiful game. 

Hmm...

There's a lot of psychology involved in such kind of play.  In the long run, the player will learn to love to do it simpler and show it in more efficient and beautiful manner.

 THIS IS AMAZING!

But are you really watching all the games? There are thousands of games played every year. Here is Inarkiev (2674) vs. Aronian (2741) from 2007

Here's Alexie Shirov vs. Nigel Short in 1999:

http://www.chess.com/article/view/spectacular-queen-sacrifice

This game comes to mind.

http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1008361

I'm surprised it wasn't brought up already