Attacking is easy, defending is hard

Attacking is easy: Look for forks, pins, discovered attacks. Look for outposts for your knights, for (half-)open files for your rooks, for active diagonals for your bishops. Activate your least active piece. Use your pawns to control central squares, to open lines, to mess up your opponent's defence. Try to find weaknesses in your opponent's position, like backrank weaknesses, undefended pieces, isolated pawns etc. Dozens of helpful principles for attacking. Obviously, as a 1300 player, I often overlook good attacking chances, but at least I know what I should look for.

Defending is, at least in my experience, much more difficult. The only rule I remember is: If your kingside is under attack, look for counterplay in the center. Which is fine, but compared to the dozens of attacking rules, it is very limited.

Obviously, one important defensive ressource is to scan your own positions for weaknesses. However, I often make the experience that a move that fixes one weakness opens another one. More often than not, defending leads to an exremely passive position (while not defending leads to material loss or checkmate).

How can I organise my defence when I am under attack? Are there good defensive principles to remember, just like the attacking principles I mentioned in the beginning?

And how can I train to defend properly? The tactic puzzles are great, but they are almost exclusively attacking puzzles. "Black to move and equalise" is very rare task in puzzles.

The double attack is one of the biggest tactical tools in chess. Try to make defensive moves that also create or set up an attack. Try to make your opponent do that same thing, defend.

When you click the puzzle menu, go to the bottom of that and select custom puzzles. From there you can choose the theme and tell it you want to concentrate on defensive puzzles.