GM games

I sometimes try and go through GM games to learn something. To me it seems like they are moving pieces around aimlessly. I can't see any reason why they are playing those particular moves. The worst part is that the annotations in something like Informator are even more mysterious. I expect to find some clear plans but what I see is confusion and more confusion. Do these GMs know what they are doing or are all of them totally deluded. The only reason I can imagine why it appears like this is that they know theory so deeply that they probably see 10 move threats ahead. I recently saw this one particular game in th Sicilian najdorf, english attack which seemed to me to be totally contrary to the main ideas in the english attack. It seemed to me that white was actually preferring to go into the endgame, something that whit should pointedly avoid in this system. What am I missing. Is ther something fundamentally wrong with me. What is th thought process of GMs and IMs and can someone like me benefit from going through their games or should I instead stick to th classics like alekhine capablanca or reti.

Look at classical, not modern games then.

What you could do is find game where GMs were matched up against significantly weaker players, somewhere between 2000 and 2400 rated.

This way you can see how they exploit mistakes and it will make much more sense to you.

Try with annotated games. A gook book is "Understanding chess move by move"

Rest assured that GMs perfectly well know what they are doing. If you find their moves confusion than it is only your own lack of understanding chess.

The best recommendation is to follow GM games with life commentary made by other GMs. This allows you to enter a complete new world of chess.

It is comforting to know that GMs know what they are doing and that it is my lack of understanding. howevr, i wonder what i can do to actually make my understanding grow. i was thinking maybe i should look at classical gaes in a book like zurich 1953 so that i can figure this mystery out. modern chess is too complex and positional and depends too much on extensiv opening thory and memorization.

Skip opening theory and just take the first 15 moves of an GM game for granted.

All you need is a cabable live commentator explaining the ideas behind different moves. Many of the big tournaments have first-class live commentary which is available on the internet. One of many examples:

http://london2013.fide.com/livegames/livevideo/archives.html

that is helpful but what i am really looking to do is to improve my own game and my understanding of the various building blocks of chess. how should i go about this. i have kasparov on fischer. should i try and exhaust and memorize all of it?

I doubt that memorizing chess games by heard has any positive effect on your ability to understand chess. I also doubt that studying opening theory makes much sense on your actual level.

The important thing is to learn motives and ideas and general rules to access a position correctly. I learned a lot from following GM games with live commentary. You get an idea how GMs think, how to find weaknesses in the opponents pawn structure and how to develop a strategic plan to exploit them. The more games you follow the broader your repertoire of ideas and motives will become. Beside that you should do a lot of tactic puzzles to train your ability to calculate accurately and to get acquainted with as much mating patterns and motives as possible.

i learned a lot from fischer vs reshevsky in kasparovs book. through that single game i got all th ideas how to play the fischer attack against the najdorf. now i am looking at fischer vs keres -the dragon variation and am expecting to learn the dragon in this way.

Don´t waste too much time with opening theory. You might end up like those poor guys who play the opening like a GM and as soon as they are out of the book they ruin their nice position within a few moves because they never learned how to play chess on their own.

kasparovs book is quite good. it will tell you the ideas as well. this is how i became quit good in th bc4 line of the najdorf as white. so it is not memorization. it is actually quite amazing that you actually begin to understand both the black and th whit side of an opening that you see in that book.