you just reinveted the wheele, ofcourse attacking, a.k.a the initiativ is something good.
still, how do you get a 700 rating in blitz wiht the good idea that you just posted. lets play some games, you'll get white and i´ll wont move any pown or piece past the 6th rank for the first 8 moves so that you can attack. deal?
I have to say, I think the exact opposite.
Defending is really difficult whereas attacking is really easy. If I get a good attacking position there always seems to be multiple good moves, if I'm defending it feels like one mistake loses the game.
I think the value of 'wait for your opponent to make a mistake' decreases as you play better opponents. The better ones will make you pay for giving them free time by playing passively.
Yeah, this is OK for weaker oppenents. But you are going to hit a wall one day once you work your way up to players who know that thwarting an attack like the one you described is actually quite easy.
I think this is an important mindset to develop for newer players, at least for the opening. Of course as you get better, you want to be flexible enough to attack the moment there's a real opportunity, but like you said in the beginning usually your opponent's attack is premature. If you simply defend by default, their pieces will be misplaced.
For many 100s of rating points this is also usually true in the middlegame too. Their "attack" is not good, so if all you do is defend first, and advance later, you'll have a better position.
As a disclaimer I'll say as you get better, your opponents will know certain... I'll call it a systematic way to pressure your position. A common example is in the king's Indian defense black often plays on the kingside and white on the queenside. When pursued correctly, there's no way to stop these ideas. Mostly you try to make your idea hit as hard and fast as you can. In most positions if you stay in passive defensive mode too long, you can lose your opportunity to attack completely.
So I think what you're doing is great, and as you look toward the future, have in mind that each middlegame has its own main idea for how to pressure the opponent. That way as you get better not only will you be able to avoid permanent passive defense, but you can work to make your attacks hit harder and faster.
Everyone waits for mistakes. The question is whether you are good enough to prove that your opponent has just made a mistake. If I were sitting down against Magnus Carlsen as White, there'd be grounds for entering my first move on the scoresheet as 1. e4?? 
Everyone waits for mistakes. The question is whether you are good enough to prove that your opponent has just made a mistake. If I were sitting down against Magnus Carlsen as White, there'd be grounds for entering my first move on the scoresheet as 1. e4??
That would be funny,
The trick with this is not exactly to play defensively but to wait until the opponent even makes a very slight mistake and punish it.
The problem is that the higher the ratings go, the less mistakes you'll see.
The trick with this is not exactly to play defensively but to wait until the opponent even makes a very slight mistake and punish it.
The problem is that the higher the ratings go, the less mistakes you'll see.
Is it fewer mistakes made or more difficult to see the mistakes because they become more subtle?
What I mean is as you get stronger, you stop, or at least lessen, making obvious mistakes like hanging pieces and placing pieces offsides. And, instead, your mistakes become more subtle like advancing one pawn when you should have advanced another to prevent a possible attack or advancement by your opponent several moves down the line.
Fewer and more subtle. Bad players sometimes make subtle mistakes too. But good players make more moves that aren't mistakes.
The types of subtle mistakes I see are more often a slightly sub-optimal piece placement. Like... say Be7 vs Bd6 where the f8-a3 diagonal is really the only important one so it seems to not matter. Oops, you played the wrong one, and now that file (e or d) is slightly more blocked, or your 2nd vs 3rd rank is slightly more blocked, so in the future your pressure is very slightly less than it could be.
And it may not even matter until very late into the game. And it may not even change the plans each side is following. But after a few of these in a row against an opponent who is stringing together enough "best" moves in a row, you'll actually have the worse position 
Hi, I'm a 1460 rapid rated player (right now at least) and I actually think attacking is better.
After having performed many attacks and many checkmates, I've realized over time that a king under attack cannot do anything to defend other than counterattack.
For example, pawn g3 creates light squared weaknesses, and the h file becomes weak to a rook battery, and if the g3 pawn is exchanged then a bishop on g2 can get pinned to the king. And if the h pawn is gone, then h1 and h2 are both able for the queen to vertically enter, and it becomes hard to guard both.
Pinning the f2 pawn to the king with a dark squared bishops is also effective.
Also, tactics are just too good. When you play good chess players at the 1400 level, they do at least 2 or 3 tactics per game, unless they were anticipated in advance and intentionally avoided. Knight forks, bishop pins, rook pins, king checks, queen kicks, etc., win tempo or threaten to win tempo, etc., too powerful and gives attackers too many options.
Review your games with an engine to see how the computer would attack.
Development is good. You've understood that. Maybe you just want to reword some of what you're saying.
I play solid openings. When I can't think of good moves, I am waiting for my opponent to make a blunder. When defending, I do the opposite. I am waiting for my opponent to make a blunder and after that I play solid moves.
Playing positionally and taking advantage of your opponent's errors can indeed be a very effective approach.
That approach may work against weaker players but it won't work against a strong player. If you just "sit and wait" you will find yourself slowly strangled until you have no safe place to go, and then it is game over. The key is learning to attack in a way that is not reckless - a careless attack fails but a well-planned attack will succeed (I am still trying to learn this).
"Sitting and waiting" is fine but it's much more effective to combine "sitting and waiting" with "attacking" at the same time. You have to do both to leverage both threats and be agile in terms of making the best possible move at every point in time. Sometimes attacking is the first priority, sometimes it is not. You cannot decide what the best move in the game is simply on style and personal preference. For example, in the context of analysis, computers have no style and they only have winning moves, regarding the agility of the computer.
There's a false dichotomy going on here. You aren't always either attacking or defending. A lot of the time, you're just trying to make moves that slowly improve your position. Learning how to make these sorts of moves can both help you know what to do while waiting for your opponent to go wrong, and also make it more likely that they'll do so.
It is interesting, though, to compare defense and attack.
In my opinion, accurate defense is more difficult but also more rewarding than attack.
Defense is stronger than attack (defense wins ties), but the slightest mis-step will lose the game, sometimes within a few moves.
Don't wait for your opponents to make a mistake, use your play to influence there blunders, by improving your position, creating tactics, creating threats etc!!!
Hey all, recently I discovered a strategy that worked that pretty well for me. I have never really won much games but after using this strategy my win rate has improved a lot; and I'm referring to the chess games I play in real life, not online; I haven't played chess online for a pretty long time so obviously if you check my profile or look at my ELO you won't see anything much impressive.
Basically, the strategy that I have discovered while playing a game of chess in real life is that ATTACKING, like moving your queen and bishop and knights aggressively to try and checkmate the king early is not as effective as DEFENDING. Why do I say that? It's simple. When you're attacking in chess, most of us are not extremely good players and therefore we tend to leave our king undefended or move our attacking pieces wrongly and end up trading them for a pawn. It is extremely easy to make mistakes when attacking but no as easy to make mistakes when defending. My style of defending is to simply maintain centre control, activate all my pieces and castle as soon as possible. I then wait for my opponent to make some stupid mistake and I capitalize on it. I never ever take the initiative to attack the opponent's king. Rather, I focus on good position and defense and value trades. Every piece I get is an advantage. I advance slowly but surely. My opinion is that in chess, the defender has a much easier time than the attacker. In fact, I wouldn't think of it as defending. I would think of it as counter-attacking, because once you spot a mistake by your opponent, you attack that weak spot over and over and win the game.