Kevin Pacey wrote on Tue, Jan 31, 2017 05:37 AM UTC:
There's a book called King Power that I haven't read in a long time. Sometimes a king assists in attacking the other king, even in the middlegame once in a while, and a king is often able to defend itself (or defend squares/pieces/pawns around it) from attack. The king regularly comes into its own in the endgame phase. In Grandmaster Secrets: Endings, American GM Andy Soltis mentions the concept of creating a mismatch in one area of the board, where a superior force overpowers a weaker one locally. Often a king is part of such a superior force. To a strong player, it's often not too hard to tell whether a king is going to help to make progress of this sort, and he really doesn't need to tally up the theoretical value of the attacking force (with a king among it) vs. the defending force to know which side will win out in a local battle, or in other words, in a mismatch massacre in the making.
There's a book called King Power that I haven't read in a long time. Sometimes a king assists in attacking the other king, even in the middlegame once in a while, and a king is often able to defend itself (or defend squares/pieces/pawns around it) from attack. The king regularly comes into its own in the endgame phase. In Grandmaster Secrets: Endings, American GM Andy Soltis mentions the concept of creating a mismatch in one area of the board, where a superior force overpowers a weaker one locally. Often a king is part of such a superior force. To a strong player, it's often not too hard to tell whether a king is going to help to make progress of this sort, and he really doesn't need to tally up the theoretical value of the attacking force (with a king among it) vs. the defending force to know which side will win out in a local battle, or in other words, in a mismatch massacre in the making.