Value of Chess Pieces – King Chess Piece

The King chess piece can be called the most important piece in chess, as the ultimate goal of any chess game is to put the king in a position from where it cannot make any move without being captured, a state known as checkmate. The side which checkmates the other’s king wins the game.

There is also the state of the king being ‘in check’. This particular state means that the king chess piece is threatened but has various moves still open. The main aim of chess is to protect one’s king at all costs, and to checkmate the other’s king.

There is one special move which the king can make, which is known as castling. The move is made with the rook piece, and has quite a few conditions attached before it is allowed. Castling consists of two moves;

• 1. The king moves two squares towards one of its rooks
• 2. The rook then takes its place on the opposite side of the king, on the square over which the king has passed

The conditions for this are numerous, the main ones being that neither the king chess piece nor the rook chess piece should’ve moved previously; there should be no pieces in between the king and the rook and most importantly, the king must not be in check or moving into a square which the other side is targeting. Castling is an important move as it takes the king out of the middle of the game into the relatively safer position on the side of the board. It should be done early in the game, allowing the other pieces to attack the other side as much as possible.

Essentially, the king piece is not used often in the beginning of the chess game play, nor actively used in the middle of gameplay. More often than not, the true use of the king chess piece is during the end of gameplay. The offensive and defensive moves up until that point are very much handled by the other chess pieces on the board. This clears up the chess board considerably, allowing the king to really assume its position in defense.

To achieve checkmate with the king chess piece in the corners of the board would require great coordination between quite a few of the other chess pieces. Although the queen is the most powerful piece in chess, it is unadvisable to use that particular chess piece to defend the king, as there is always the danger of a discovered attack.

A discovered attack scenario takes place when a chess piece moves out of the way of another chess piece. This is a fairly powerful strategic maneuver where the result maybe a win for the attacking side.

Sometimes, in computer chess or tournaments, the chess pieces and their moves are assigned values. These are known as relative values, and are used to calculate the points in the game. The king chess piece is never assigned a value because it cannot be captured, and is the most valuable piece. In some cases the king has been assigned a very large number; to give the impression that losing the king means a loss.