Defensive Move puzzles Incredibly Difficult!?

Who else finds the Defensive Move puzzles incredibly difficult? Or is it just me?

Compared to other puzzles (at my puzzle rating level), I find Defensive Move puzzles far harder than any other puzzles. They seem to be "out of the ballpark" harder than anything else. What could cause this strange anomaly?

1. Am I far worse at defensive moves than anything else? This is feasible. Like many beginners, I don't notice or counter my opponent's plans or tactics very well at all. Even when I know I have to look for these things in a puzzle, I have great difficulty finding the right move(s).

2. Is there something wrong with the ratings of Defensive Move puzzles and why would that be? Are Defensive Move puzzles rarely done by lower rated players and more commonly done only by higher rated players? Would this skew their ratings?

3. Is there something wrong with the algorithm and/or human selection oversight for Defensive Move puzzles?

Example: Look at Puzzle #ZsBo7. This puzzle is rated 901. Is there any way this is a super simple 901 puzzle??? I mean most 900 puzzles are one move mates or one move captures of a hanging piece. This is quite a complicated position, surely nothing like a 901 rating.

I would be interested in other players' experiences of Defensive Move puzzles. At the "Easiest" level (where I start to get bulk quick puzzles done as a warm-up before I progress up the levels, the Defensive Move puzzles are also but not always heavily skewed to endgame puzzles. This might be because the sample size of "Easiest" puzzles at my puzzle rating is simply not large enough.

It would take a lot of words to explain it but this is messing up my puzzle training method and destroying my confidence. Sorry, that is just my frustration talking. I need fast and successful puzzle solutions first up for pattern recognition practice plus actually a little boost to my chess confidence (which needs a boost). After that, I push up the difficulty levels to try to extend my learning. With Defensive Move I can't puzzles easy enough at the start for that progression. Hmmm, do I ditch them or find another way to train in them? Should I do them unrated or maybe just do them at slowly "Normal" level till I get the hang of defensive moves? Just spit balling solutions here.

Defensive puzzles are the most valuable puzzles in untimed in my opinion. It's not "white to play and win" in the traditional sense, where you play the forcing moves and your opponent responds - you actually have to look for your opponent's checks, captures and threats in response to your own move choices. T
This reinforces a very important skill that a lot of players lack.

@crtex said in #2:
> Defensive puzzles are the most valuable puzzles in untimed in my opinion. It's not "white to play and win" in the traditional sense, where you play the forcing moves and your opponent responds - you actually have to look for your opponent's checks, captures and threats in response to your own move choices. T
> This reinforces a very important skill that a lot of players lack.

I agree with this. The defensive move puzzles have certainly diagnosed my complete lack of this kind of thinking. I simply don't look at opponent's checks, captures and threats... at all... ever. Now it is easy to be critical of beginners and rookies for this failing but in faster chess (I still find even rapid very fast) we are already overloaded with trying to see all the most basic stuff and not hanging our pieces and not blundering every move. That's all we can do.

Having said that, I need to grapple with these puzzles and indeed with the other advanced tactics puzzles which all give me enormous trouble. I clearly have trouble seeing anything beyond the simplest forms of the simplest tactics (like pins and forks).

I am trying to work out how I should study tactics and what method(s) I should use. I have been told I should do lots of simple, rapid tactics and I have been trying to do this. I have been trying to get up to 100 tactics puzzles a day for 5 days a week. But I am consistently failing to do this in the 2 x 1 hour sessions per day that I have allotted to this training. I can only get near this number if I do very simple puzzles ("Easiest" level on the basic tactics).

When I try to do advanced tactics I run into great difficulty, Even on my "Easiest" level, puzzles which are often rated in the 900s in my case, the advanced tactics often take me ages to do and I fail them often enough (for big puzzle rating losses) that it looks like I am sandbagging my puzzle rating down even though I am not.

These problems illustrate to me that I need fast puzzle sessions and slow puzzle sessions. It also illustrates that 2 hours of faster puzzles a day is not nearly enough for me. I might need to do 2 hours a day on fast puzzles and another 2 hours on slow puzzles and then my other training and playing. Or I could forget all other training until I can see tactics better. I am starting to think I should do that.

Perhaps the basic tactics should be my fast puzzles and advanced tactics should be my slow puzzles. I clearly can't do even the easiest advanced puzzles fast. There are puzzles rated in the 900s in Advanced tactics that simply leave me completely baffled. Maybe I could work out some of them if I took 5 or 10 minutes a puzzle. Is there an upper limit where I should just give up on a puzzle rather than waste endless time? I am thinking 5 minutes should be the upper limit. Beating my brain against a puzzle totally insoluble to me at my current low level seems a complete waste of time.

The goal of the "easiest" tactical puzzles is to train your tactical vision, your ability to spot basic tactics immediately. This is important because these are the building blocks for more advanced tactics, and you will never spot advanced tactics if you can't reach a position that you immediately see as a "basic" win. For example when white attacks a castled king (imagine white Qh6, Bd3, and black Kg8, pawn f7), there exists a 4-move mate with Bh7+ Bg6+ Qh7+ and then Qxf7#. Calculating 4 moves is very hard to do, let alone the previous moves to even arrive at this position. but if you know the pattern you can skip all of these moves.
This is the purpose of doing simple rapid tactics repeatedly. If low rated puzzles are still difficult, it just means you have work to do here. According to chess teacher Heisman this is a very time-consuming part of training, taking hundreds of hours to develop. It is very worth it though.

The final result is that you should be able to instinctively spot basic tactics. The first 20 or so tactics in Puzzle Storm should each take a few seconds to find (with some exceptions, but most of them). When someone blunders a 2-move tactic in blitz, you immediately spot it without thinking, and calculate only to verify that it works, etc.

Where can we practice defensive moves puzzles?

@gilligan841 said in #5:
> Where can we practice defensive moves puzzles?

Select Puzzle Themes.
Scroll down until you see the heading Advanced.
Then find Defensive Move.

Have fun! Be prepared, these are very challenging puzzles.

Defence, Counter Attacks , Endings 7 Middlegames are all there to be learnt by playing over Complete Games . I guess you can learn by puzzles but it's not my generation' . Learning from certain Greats like Botvinnik Smyslov Petrosian korchnoi 7 Lasker about some of these topics to me might make those puzzles easier to UNDERSTAND ,,, just a hunch good luck there are literally hundreds of rating points there just for the taking & Studying Playing

@crtex said in #4:
> The goal of the "easiest" tactical puzzles is to train your tactical vision, your ability to spot basic tactics immediately. This is important because these are the building blocks for more advanced tactics, and you will never spot advanced tactics if you can't reach a position that you immediately see as a "basic" win. For example when white attacks a castled king (imagine white Qh6, Bd3, and black Kg8, pawn f7), there exists a 4-move mate with Bh7+ Bg6+ Qh7+ and then Qxf7#. Calculating 4 moves is very hard to do, let alone the previous moves to even arrive at this position. but if you know the pattern you can skip all of these moves.
> This is the purpose of doing simple rapid tactics repeatedly. If low rated puzzles are still difficult, it just means you have work to do here. According to chess teacher Heisman this is a very time-consuming part of training, taking hundreds of hours to develop. It is very worth it though.
>
> The final result is that you should be able to instinctively spot basic tactics. The first 20 or so tactics in Puzzle Storm should each take a few seconds to find (with some exceptions, but most of them). When someone blunders a 2-move tactic in blitz, you immediately spot it without thinking, and calculate only to verify that it works, etc.

In the last two or three months I have been doing many puzzles (for a rookie) and also testing out methods for doing puzzles for training. I have also been asking lots of questions on this forum and have been getting good advice, thanks.

It is quite tricky to get puzzles just at the right level so that they still have a basic challenge but can be done quickly enough to get the repetitions of patterns up to a sensible rate and number. This is because I have been doing them one tactic or motif at a time per 1 hour session. I cannot yet conceive of seeing, and executing, any tactic in a "few seconds". I would say the absolute simplest 2 move tactic would still take me 30 seconds to see and execute. It can often take me 15 seconds to see a 1 move tactic!!! Obviously, this is appallingly bad by the standards of anyone who can play chess even a bit.

Does this mean I should just about forget all other puzzle training and just do 1 move puzzles and "Easiest" puzzles, pushing the former until I can do say 360 in an hour and the latter to say 120 in an hour? I would never get near that yet. But maybe I should test myself. The results will be so bad, I know, but the tests should be done.

Update 1.

I took me 5 minutes to do 10 x 1 move checkmates at a puzzle rating of about 1500 which is also about my playing rating. It takes me something like 10 seconds to visually/mentally resolve a new position from a nonsensical jumble into a sensical (is that a word?) chess position. Then I have to try to find moves that are actually checks and which one is actually a mate. This can easily take another 20 seconds on average. Is every beginner / rookie this bad or am I just "special"? Beginning to think I am "special" and not in a good way.

Just when I am beginning to think I am x bad, I learn, "No, I am not x bad. I am 10x bad. Hang on, nope, I am not 10x bad, I am 100x bad."

Wow, insight is never good news.

@Wodjul said in #8:
> I took me 5 minutes to do 10 x 1 move checkmates at a puzzle rating of about 1500 which is also about my playing rating. ... Is every beginner / rookie this bad or am I just "special"?
IMHO the more important question is if training the puzzles helps you spot those patters faster and more reliably. If you are improving, I wouldn't worry too much where you started. What counts is where do you get.

@crtex said in #2:
> Defensive puzzles are the most valuable puzzles
In my games, the perennial problem in front of me tends not be "Me to play and win" but "Me to play and not drop the evaluation by 3 points" :-)