The tactics both players prepared and avoided before reaching the final position are sometimes tremendously more complicated than anything that was actually played in the game.
Threatening such tactics are also mechanisms to gain positional pluses like space, pawn structure, piece activity, king safety, etc.
If any of those 6 players were to play a 2000 rated player, the finishing tactics would likely be much more flashy.
(p. 75)
Chapter Nine
WHAT TO DO IN THE MIDDLE GAME
A GREAT MASTER, Richard Teichmann, once said that
'Chess is 95 per cent tactics '. And he was referring to the
games of masters, who make a lifetime study of the game and
whose chess is practically free of blunders. Even if you
allow that Teichmann's statement is exaggerated, it still
remains true that the decisive factor in the majority of master
games is a tactical coup which one player saw and the other
didn't. In master chess, the main tactical line quite often
doesn't appear in the actual game because the loser avoids it
and chooses a different and longer way of losing ; but in
amateur games, the possibility of combinations, many of
which are missed, occur all the time.
Barden, Leonard. 1959. An Introduction to Chess Moves and Tactics Simply Explained. New York, N.Y.: Dover Publications, Inc.
The tactics both players prepared and avoided before reaching the final position are sometimes tremendously more complicated than anything that was actually played in the game.
Threatening such tactics are also mechanisms to gain positional pluses like space, pawn structure, piece activity, king safety, etc.
If any of those 6 players were to play a 2000 rated player, the finishing tactics would likely be much more flashy.
yes I agree tactics are used to subject lines to falsification and there is a symbiotic relationship between strategy and tactics but it remains a matter of conjecture of just how tactically complicated those games were. I really wonder if one is not simply better off practising two move cheapos as one is much more complicated sequences. I actually heard or read somewhere that the fabled soviet school advocated practising lots of simple tactics rather than much more involved ones but cannot corroborate it.
which are missed, occur all the time.
Barden, Leonard. 1959. An Introduction to Chess Moves and Tactics Simply Explained. New York, N.Y.: Dover Publications, Inc.
No one is questioning that tactics are important or decisive at any level.
Did you miss the point of that bolded text? That book quote merely says the same thing that 011 said, in a different way: flashy tactics are usually not seen in master games because the players are usually good enough to avoid them.
Did you miss the point of that bolded text? That book quote merely says the same thing that 011 said, in a different way: flashy tactics are usually not seen in master games because the players are usually good enough to avoid them.
my question is not concerned with the extent of 'flashiness', as you seem to have erroneously assumed, but with relative complexity unless of course you equate flashiness with complexity. The two to my mind are not synonymous. Yes its understood that strong players use their tactical awareness to aviod pitfalls, but this does not answer my question about the extent of the relative complexity of the tactics.
Furhermore if you have read Euwes book Chess master v chess amatuer it becomes self evident that the master does not emply excessively complex or flashy tactics to overcome his weaker opponent.
Yeah, a GM could answer better how tactical the games were, I won't try.
As for short combinations (of tactics or strategy!) there's certainly something to be said. Who was the world champ... Botvinnik? Who said after a tournament he needed to work on seeing small combinations better. And for positional improvement Karpov was (apparently) the master of spotting short sequences that improved his position.
---
Anyway, I guess my answer to your question then would be, sure, complex tactics may be a niche situation. You may play a whole game without needing to go into any kind of deep analysis. But when the position makes it necessary it's certainly a nice skill to have heh. As for drilling relatively simple tactics until they're 2nd nature, I'm sure a case can be made for that (certainly if world champs miss things too). Just as long as people realize there's no magic bullet, and that a good player has lots of different skills 
my question is not concerned with the extent of 'flashiness', as you seem to have erroneously assumed, but with relative complexity unless of course you equate flashiness with complexity. The two to my mind are not synonymous. Yes its understood that strong players use their tactical awareness to aviod pitfalls, but this does not answer my question about the extent of the relative complexity of the tactics.
You're either still missing the point, or else your question(s) is not conveying its intent. You're focusing on my use of the word "flashy," by which I meant "non-elementary" or "complex," which exactly answers your question. Another quote from a different book that says the same thing in yet a different way:
(p. 97)
I found myself disquieted by the game. Television audiences want to
see action! In this case, all the drama remained hidden behind the cloak of
(p. 98)
possibility. The television audience could hardly appreciate the human
torment that Garry was putting himself through. I thought that this is the
hardship that chess faces; sponsors were slavishly devoted to television
broadcasting. Without television shows and viewer ratings, sponsors
weren't interested in supporting our sport. How to reveal the extraordinary
drama contained in this analysis? Perhaps the Internet has arrived just in
time for our rescue.
Seirawan, Yasser. 2006. Winning Chess Combinations. London: Gloucester Publishers plc.
@0110001101101000
yes this is what I suspected. GM Andrew Soltis in his book How to study chess which is essentially for beginners illustrates a world championship game between Karpov and Kasparov where neither of the players of necessity had to look beyond a 5 tempi horizon, that is two and a half moves.
I believe you all are just talking about Zipf's Law...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law
As in length of words in a given language, I have no doubt (though no proof) that chess follows the same law, except that instead of the lengths of words, the length of move sequences is involved: the longer the lookahead sequence required, the less frequent that requirement is, in a roughly inverse relationship.
Tactics training attempts to fill your mind with various tactical paterns and give you as many options as possible.They are like arrows on your quiver , but It's up to your creativity how you will use them.
Actually no i have not missed the point at all and infact it seems that no one with the exception of 0110001101101000 and laterally sqod has actually managed to understand what it is I am asking. Perhaps its my fault in not being expressive enough. Let me make it quite clear so that there can be no misunderstanding.
I am not asking about the symbiotic relationship between tactics and position, referred to three times, I am not asking about the creation of tactics and how to utilise tactical motifs, I am not asking about tactics that are hidden in the position and that strong players use to avoid certain lines they feel are detrimental to their position, what I am actually asking about is the relative complexity of tactics for it appears to me that there exists a disparity between tactical exercises and what actually occurs in praxis. In other words as one builds a position of strength from which our astute friends have acknowledged 'tactics will naturally flow', the decisive tactic when it manifests itself appears to me to be quite elementary as opposed to the very complex tactics which one meets doing tactical exercises.
Now I do not for a single moment suspect that very complex tactics are present and not often missed, clearly they are, however I simply wonder at the practical value of doing very complex tactical exercises when possibly (and this is the premise i would like to test), simple ones are just as effective.
I believe you all are just talking about Zipf's Law...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law
As in length of words in a given language, I have no doubt (though no proof) that chess follows the same law, except that instead of the lengths of words, the length of move sequences are involved: the longer the lookahead sequence required, the less frequent that requirement is, in a roughly inverse relationship.
A very interesting hypothesis, for chess is undoubtedly a language and expresses a narrative.
As a side note i would also like any comments on whether tactical exercises can be deemed to be detrimental to the progress of a chess player because we may form bad habits. For example, sharpening the game when there is no necessity and no advantage to be had, constantly looking for tactical solutions when there are none present in the position and which may produce a tendency to ignore our opponents plans and ideas.
I do see your point.
I def agree with your concept that you can develop bad habits in chess if you ONLY study tactics, precisely because you start to lag and not practice the positional chess required to set up tactics.
Tactics is essentially the skill of winning WON positions. And as you know, most positions in chess aren't clearly won/lost, and in fact, the stronger you get, the more decisive these quieter positions in determining the game outcome.
I know some will argue that tactics teaches you open lines, development, and other positional concepts, which I do agree with. But it totally lacks in understanding critical concepts like superior minor piece and other factors that if you don't actually practice them, are usually totally missed in terms of consideration.
I do agree with you that tactics puzzles tend to be harder, often a lot more so, than what we actually encounter in our games. But that's to be expected; for two big reasons:
1) You are only worrying about tactics in the puzzle, so your tactical acumen goes up. Similarly, your positional acumen during that puzzle might be shockingly low - I've been a bit horrified while doing "Practical Chess Exercises" by Ray Cheng, who mixes positional and tactical puzzles, that I might spend 5 minutes working out some complex tactical line, when the clear answer (obvious in retrospect) is trading a bad minor piece for a better one or just eliminating a key bishop that would trade itself for my N outpost.
2) Getting those super complex tactical positions that REQUIRE that sort of tactical acumen requires strong positional and tactical by BOTH sides to set up a position requiring such tactical acumen to win.
"However when i look at master games, most of the decisive tactics are relatively simple".
It all looks easy but it ain't. It s very hard to let it look easy. Most things that look easy are in fact the opposite.
I am the same as you Alex i do way more tactical puzzles than i actually play, infact all I really do is tactical puzzles. To illustrate the point i am trying to make I picked a game at random, a five minute game from my favourite player, Yacov Horrowitz played less than an hour ago, lets look at it from the perspective of its complexity as regards calculating variations,
the largest and possibly the most complex variation from opening to the beginning of the endgame was roughly 9 tempi long, that is 4 and a half moves all of which are forced and any club player could have calculated, Nxf6 Bxf6, exf Rxe2, Rd8+ Kf7, Rd7+ Kxf6 and Rxb7. Now I realise that as a patzer i may have missed countless deep and complicated variations but it appears to me that this game consisted of relatively uncomplicated variations in comparison to some very complicated ones we meet while doing tactical exercises, infact many of the sequences were no more than 5 tempi long, that is two and a half moves.
I actually do think the tactic itself is easy, as the OP posted, but that's missing the hard part. The hard part is setting up the conditions to make that tactic possible, which is often more a matter of winning positionally in these higher level games, and is not at all simple, even with CPU analysis to help.
Again, I don't think it's fair to look at that GM game and judge it only by the complexity of tactics or required calculation. If you're not seeing any of the positional considerations as well that underlie the moves you haven't commented on, you're almost certainly not understanding why the GM is playing like they are.
And those positional considerations don't have to be complex calculational ones - they're often simple 1-mover decisions, like the best place to put a piece in a situation where there are no won tactics.
Your comments could be similarly applied to Botvinnik's games illustrated in the excellent book "Simple Chess" by Stean. ALmost all the tactics and required calculation in the games shown require like <1500 level tactics. And without Stean's commentary, a player of your/my strength (1300-1700 blitz on chess.com), most of Botvinnik's moves would look like he's just shuffling pieces to reasonable-looking squares, and waiting for a combo.
Then you read Stean's commentary, and you see how he's gradually setting up a pawn chain for a superior N outpost, setting up a forced trade of the enemy B that would otherwise liquidate that outpost N, then avoiding excess trades that would otherwise weaken his monster outpost N (these Ns are less powerful in endgames), and it's like "woah - Botvinnik was crazy good!"
But you'd never get that if you did the sort of analysis you just did, which is look only at positions in the game with forced tactical contact points. You'd just see a bunch of 1500-level combos that you'd say "I could do that, not that impressive."
Like probably most beginner/intermediate players I spend most of my time practising tactics, some of which are relatively easy and some of which are excruciatingly difficult. However when i look at master games, most of the decisive tactics are relatively simple, please consider the following.
or this famous one here,
and even this one here
You can see that these decisive tactics all came from master games and were for the most part fairly simple. this really got me wondering whether there is any benefit in studying really complicated tactics generated by computer? The reason I ask is that it appears to me that in the majority of instances the decisive tactical sequence is rather elementary. What do you guys think?