The art of defending

I feel that defending is an undervalued skill and it is as important if not more important than attacking. Frequently when the opponent launches a seemingly good but unjustified attack you have to defend patiently and then counter attack later. It is important to search for the obectively best moves in this and not be flustered that you are under attack. Think to yourself that when the opponents attack has petered out you will have the attack.

The best defence is a good offence.  I find that trying to defend usually ends badly.

IMO the best defender was always Korchnoi. Loved his style, he lived dangerously, got assaulted, defended the assault and when it was over he counter attacked and won.

There are very few good books on defending . Everyone wants to attack and noone wants to defend !  Art of Middlegame by Keres & Kotov has a chapter in it on defending difficult positions ( by Keres ) that is very good . 

Victor Korchnoi made a career out of defending difficult positions. 

I feel like the truest soul of chess lies in defending and positional play. Chess is at its core a draw, both sides are balanced. When you concentrate on attacking all the time, you hit barrier after barrier. If you try to make a move that unbalances the situation, it probably leaves you slightly worse objectively. Defending is different, it's about cutting out every last thing the opponent tries. I think chess defending is more like tetris or something than chess attacking, I might even speculate it might be more suitable for people with OCD. Looking for that elusive attack can be frustrating and you don't know there's an answer, at the early stages of defending or after a dodgy sacrifice, you know that you OUGHT to be ahead if only you can work out what to do and calculate it.    

I would much rather play correct than head into an attack that won but was shown to be bad later if you only had more time to calculate at the board. It might be different if we were FMs and many of our games were dull draws, but that's because they already know how to defend correctly. No point in dazzling sacrifices if neither player has a clue how to defend anyway.  

There is no art to chess....it's pure science. Computers proved that by beating all of humanity.

Art implies emotion and computers don't have any....so pleez don't taint the art world.

I'd like to point out that even the best computer can be beat at chess if a single calculation is off(which is fairly easy to acheive).

Chess does have an element of art to it at the highest levels ... 

That's like saying that there's no art in photography because photoshop can do things a camera guided by human eyes and hands cannot.

Would you consider Soltis' New Art of Defence in Chess any good? 

He's not saying that, he's saying that chess is a game based around strategy and cunning, not some random bout of anger or hapiness.

TGL,

Chess when played by humans is an art and only10-20% science. No one calculates everthing possible, they play moves that look right. This has been repeated over and over by all the greatest players, Alekhine and Kasparov specifically.

Alive, what tempts you to venture into a thread you can't block people from pointing out the fact you are a pimply faced boy posing as a female?

Not like you to be so reckless.   

"In a chess players thinking a major role is played by psychological factors.He is often guided not by objective evaluations but by subjective feelings,those that he can allow himself."

-Korchnoi

You've obviously achieved greatness alive...

can you tell us about it? Yah got loads of cool motivational stories about other people who have done so

What have you accomplished

The analogy breaks down on so many different levels.  For one a person attempting breaking and entering isn't bound by turn based rules, and second of all given Chess's turn-based nature and pieces being mathematical units moving about on a 64 square board an attack inevitably has to run out of steam.  Pieces will either get traded off or move elsewhere, as maintaining the contact may be beneficial to the defender in such cases.  Even if the attack is sound then the defender at worst (from the attacker's perspective) is only a little worse off than before.  For example the position's evaluation is the same as before but with fewer pieces and doubled kingside pawns in an endgame or whatnot so the attacker is half a pawn better than before the attack started.

pdve wrote:

I feel that defending is an undervalued skill and it is as important if not more important than attacking. Frequently when the opponent launches a seemingly good but unjustified attack you have to defend patiently and then counter attack later. It is important to search for the obectively best moves in this and not be flustered that you are under attack. Think to yourself that when the opponents attack has petered out you will have the attack.

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True. Defense requires patience and accuracy. Everyone loves to attack. And why not? It's much easier to do than sit back and defend. But there are also other types of defense than just 'weathering the storm'. There is trading/exchanging (to dissipate the attack) and there is counter-attack (my favorite form of defense).

All you give are generic answers. Be helpful for once.