Tactics are more important but the score would be still even as they are both 1500 players... It's a bit like asking what's heavier 1kg of iron or 1kg of feathers...
I disagree with this because at the lower levels (1500 is considered lower level, although the post wasn't about anyone being 1500 or any rating for that matter, the rating of 1500 was just being used as an example, read the post more closely folks!), however, at the rating of 1500, tactical skill/ability is way more important then strategic and even positional Chess. Therefore if the positionally skilled 1500 rated player is making tactical errors left and right, he'll simply lose all his pieces to the tactically skilled 1500 player, it's hard to win when you're down alot of material (which is exactly what will happen to a tactically weak player, no matter how "good" his position is) and certainly a 1500 rated player is competent enough to close out an endgame or two with a lone Queen and/or 2 rooks or even 1 rook..
Sure, tactics are more important at lower levels, but the premise is that they both have the same rating. This literally means that it is statistically expected that they score 50% against each other. It could look like this:
Player A: Positional strength = 2000; Tactical strength = 1450; Rating = 1500
Player B: Positional strength = 1000; Tactical strength = 1550; Rating = 1500
The huge positional edge of player A is compensated by the small tactical edge of player B, since tactics are more important...
What about two GMs both at 2700 rating? The 2700 vs 2700 same scenario should have tactical and positional knowledge to exploit enough to convert into a win, so I'd believe that they would win roughly the same amount against each other (IF ratings were fixed at this level).
I guess this hypothetical indirectly gets at an intriguing side-argument that a flaw in positional chess is less exploitable until a higher level where the competition seems to take advantage of this more consistently. What rating is this threshold? Probably around 1600-1800 chess.com range I'd estimate, so by this logic, yes I suppose in practical chess with a 1500 player versus another 1500 player (ratings NOT fixed, but merely just same rating during this game), then yeah the tactically better player might very well win more and increase their rating quicker. This isn't to say tactics are necessarily "better" but it is just something more tangible around this rating range.
Very cool discussion which has come out of this hypothetical presented!
I'd agree with that pretty much, perhaps the debate should have been about "Class" players and not "Titled" players. I think at the lower levels (Class rated players, which is probably 80-90% of the Chess community) tactics is way more important then both positional Chess and overall Chess strategy, if one would consider tactics "better" or not, I guess so?.., sounds more like semantics if anything. The semantics part comes in with whether tactics are better or more important, pretty much saying the same thing, just worded differently.
I'd think they are "better" (that is to say more important) then positional Chess at the Class level, as most games decided at that level will be decided by one side making a tactical error and the other side exploiting it. The positional errors are exploited more often at the higher ends, however this is not to say that a Class player couldn't take advantage of a positional error made in a game, it's probably less likely though. Therefore with that being said, the person who is stronger tactically would have the definite advantage over the one who's weaker tactically but again, this probably only applies at the Class levels, and even a debate over what those Classes are, rating ranges etc. could be made as well, but I'm speaking more in a general sense.