This makes it much easier to select for not terrible puzzles with an algorithm, and to have a good UI for puzzle solving, but it filters out many defensive puzzles both because it excludes positions where there are multiple defenses, and it excludes positions where you just manage to not lose without turning the position into a clearly winning one.
I am not particularly skilled in chess but the LiChess puzzles are a daily practice on the subway... I think it is my favorite. I really like the puzzle scenarios where you are down material but the correct series of moves leads ot a win. This insight is a confluence with BJJ where sometimes you can be in a bad position and reverse out of it...
2. There is no difference between attack puzzle and defence puzzle, in the sense that mentally you must play both sides - choose optimal moves for the defender.
1) Not always but very often spotting a winning tactic wins the game immediately 2) You develop an intuition about various piece position combinations and geometries and features that usually produce these tactics in a game.
Now consider these a problem, say white to move, and go back one move. Likely, black just made a move which enabled this tactic. It’s hard to craft a puzzle where you are asking what Black should do: the main thing is to not make the losing move, but are all other moves that avoid it just as good? Not at all!
There are lots of books that try to teach and train this, but it doesn’t fit into an efficient package like the “find the tactic” one does.
One exception here is when one side has sacrificed material for a speculative attack. In those cases just avoiding mate is a kind of puzzle that fits. I have occasionally seen some puzzles like this (eg. Attack and Defence by Aagaard) but it’s a lot more work to put together, and occurs much less often in games which is probably why it’s much less common.
Probably because it's easier to design puzzles for mating/attacking and people want to attack/mate.
> As a result in a chess match I constantly look for ways to attack my opponent, not to prevent an attack from my opponent.
You will eventually learn to defend too as you play more games. It's pattern recognition.
For example, there are varieties of ways to attack a fianchetto position. Once you feel comfortable exploiting fianchetto positions, you'll notice your opponent attacking your fianchetto positions and act to prevent it. Just like constantly trying to find back rank mates against your opponent will eventually teach you to watch your own back rank. Learning to attack teaches you to defend and vice versa.
A lot of defence can also fall under the umbrella of strategy rather than tactics, as in the dream scenario you'd basically only be trying to keep the position in a state that has all the needed defences built into it. Doesn't really work like that in reality. But studying and practicing strategic principles of the positions you're playing could be another thing that could help, especially the pitfalls of those positions. Most positions have a bunch of well known pitfalls that will improve your defensive game quick if you keep those in mind while playing. A lot of these can be found on YouTube.
One other thing to try out is to also play normal tactics, but with the board flipped.
[1]: https://aimchess.com
So I play him one day. Now, I'm not a good chess player, but I know all the rules, even the obscure ones, and I my attention span is a lot better than a 6 year old's. And he almost beat me.
We signed him up for chess classes with an instructor over Zoom. He's beating kids with a lot more experience than him. And I find myself trying to train to stay ahead of him. I sit in the room with him during his classes and pay attention, did all the lessons on chess.com and lichess.org, and am constantly doing puzzles on lichess (even using the training dashboard to focus on areas in having problems). I train probably 5x more than my son.
And he's still giving me a run for my money. I let him do chess puzzles with me and he frequently gets frustrated with how slow I am on some of the puzzles. He "sees" the 1-move and 2-move solutions almost immediately. The only place I have advantage is anything 3+ moves. If he doesn't see the move immediately, he doesn't know how to develop to a position that he can solve. I'm not much better, but I can occasionally get it, and that's the only way I'm staying ahead of him right now.
I'm similarly frustrated with the training on lichess. When I play games, I find I'm completely lost on the middle game. I play the openings that my kid's teacher has been drilling, then try to sit in a holding pattern of not making egregious mistakes until the other player makes a mistake I can recognize. I'm basically incapable of moving the game in a direction I want, and my simplistic play is easy pickings for a lot of people as they bait me into--in retrospect--rather basic traps.
I've just about resigned myself to living vicariously through my child on this issue. His classes being online, the instructor is often distracted with the other children being noisy to give real attention to training. My son recently moved up to a new class level (and he's now the youngest in the room!), so hopefully that will get better. I try to fill in that in-person coaching by just parroting what his teacher says and pointing out where my son isn't following along quite right.
There are also lots of coaches who will work with kids online or (pre-covid) in person, and lots of kids' chess events. I would stay away from in-person events for a while longer though, especially large ones, because of covid.
I'll check out these books, but books are a pretty bad format for me. We actually have two kids, and I'm the lead of my project at work, so I don't have a lot of me time. Still, I'd really like to be the person he can count on to ask for help for at least a few more years.
I play defensively so with that underlying mindset I solve chess problems to improve my tactical acuity/prowess ("Beware of that blunder!"). For that I naturally flip the board in my mind back and forth ("What blunder happened?") and at times go through the back-history of moves when I wonder: how the hell did that happen?
I played with some higher ranked player whom I would consider "highly aggressive" but who turned out to be quite defensive players when competing with similar/higher ranked ones, so there is also that ;) Why play defensive if you are way better at anticipating and spotting blunders. So, this comes back full circle at the importance of building a solid base.
The closest I have gotten is that a defensive posture motions toward a stalemate, where as an attack mentality mobilises toward a win.
For peace, a (static/deadlock) stalemate is a good outcome. So at heart, the question is about the difference between a war footing or a peaceable one.
Even the top defenses have an attack basis of whether the prevent the control of the center and the edges.
But the real devious defense to force your opponent into a winning a piece that destroys their position attack strategy.
> Why are chess puzzles not 50% about spotting and preventing attacks?
Chess is a problem where you need to reason about all the actions your opponents can do. Since a lot of chess teaching tradition comes from a linear medium (books) they have a trouble representing how an attacker would attack differently against if different defensive move are played. This problem does not exist as attacker as one can force certain moves on the defender. Thus the branching factor of the puzzle can often be contained. If books would represent the branching reactions, the book will also spoil which moves to pick, finding a solution to a chess problem would be reduced to reading all the replies and pick the most favourable. Another problem is that "defend for 6 rounds" or "defend all material" might allow and train solutions which survive satisfy that criterion but cause the player to loose (a sacrifice would have been the only way to prevent losing) while solutions exists where this isn't the case. In a linear medium it is not possible to handle that well without just printing a solution and say that is the right one.
> Any advice to train that specifically?
You need to leave the linear medium. This is possible very easily by playing certain board configurations against an AI. However generating such a board positions for which there is a few or even one unambiguous chain of moves that constitutes a valid defense is difficult. My wild guess is that they are near the border of endgame libraries for both players. I think a chain of moves would constitute a valid defense if it leads to a state which is in the players winning end game library for all actions the opponent takes however to make this puzzle difficult this chain of move needs to be hard to find and other moves must be actually bad. My proposal would be to search for board positions where the vast majority of moves including some promising moves lead to a position in the attackers end game library while there exists one chain of moves which independent of actions of the attacker lead to a position in the endgame library of the defender. Caveats: finding moves at the border of the two endgame libraries with these properties might be hard. Many positions of these are likely synthetic and would never arise in natural play.
In chess there are two possibilities that give you an advantage material and positional advantage. If you plan on "defending" your position you most likely want to protect your pieces and don't leave them undefened, but that is not enough since you have to take into account forks and binds and more. If you want to play defensive you can try placing your figures in a more defensive style (see hedgehog or similar), but that is not something you can derive chess problems from. So long story short. Chess problems on defending are in essence the same as the attacking once. You have to find the actual threat. If you want to be better at defending just take the time and try to understand what your opponent is planning as well. It is the same thought process in the end and you will get better with time.
You can also use the defensive theme on Lichess: https://lichess.org/training/defensiveMove
It looks like there's the same concept in chess. [2]
This seems like the way to teach initiative. And maintaining initiative.
Further, spotting successful tactics for yourself is a very related skill to spotting them for the oponent, you can even just press f (I think) to look at the board from their PoV and look for their tactics that way.
Maybe you like the Quiet Move type puzzles? Those are a weak spot for me.
Not exactly. E.g. your opponent offers a material sacrifice and gets a big attack if you accept. If you survive the attack, then you are ahead material because of the sacrifice, and you probably win. So it's about whether you can wriggle your way out of a lot of possible attacking lines. That's a bit different from attacking, which in these puzzles is usually about finding a single forcing line.
Instead the main approach is to just mix new problems into the pool and let users try them. If there are no plausible alternatives, everyone gets the right move and the problem quickly becomes too low-rated to be shown to most players. If there are tempting alternatives and the correct solution is hard to calculate, it will become high-rated and only shown to stronger users.
If you are trying to come up with some sort of passive turtle strategy you are going to get crushed.
Problems are attack oriented so that there is a forced solution
Just play more
[Not a chess god but reached ~2170 USCF back in the day]
Did you perhaps mean Lipnitsky ("Questions of Modern Chess Theory - A Soviet Classic")?
There's also Lisitsin/Lisitsyn ("First/Second Book of Chess Strategy").