[jdkenney]

To get better you definitely need to prevent giving your opponent winning tactics. It’s important to study being the active side for two reasons:

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.