a value to the king relative to the other pieces, as it cannot be captured or exchanged and must be protected at all costs. In this sense, its value could be considered infinite. As an assessment of the king's capability as an offensive piece in the endgame, it is often considered to be slightly stronger than a bishop or knight. Emanuel Lasker gave it the value of a knight plus a pawn (i.e. four points on the scale of chess piece relative value), though some other theorists evaluate it closer to three points. It is better at defending friendly pawns than the knight is, and it is better at attacking enemy pawns than the bishop is. Unicode Unicode defines two codepoints for king: ♔ U+2654 White Chess King (HTML &#9812;) ♚ U+265A Black Chess King (HTML &#9818;) See also Notes References FIDE Handbook: Laws of Chess External links Fianchetto variation of the King’s Indian Defence Piececlopedia: King by Fergus Duniho and Hans Bodlaender, The Chess Variant Pages Chess pieces