Gallagher's and Golubev's books are excellent. They are both devotees of the King's Indian and have a lot to say that is interesting and insightful.
For a slightly different approach to the King's Indian, "King's Indian Defence, Modern Practice" by Alexander Kalinin is an interesting book. When I first saw this book I thought it was basically a database dump with a bit of annotation thrown in to conceal that fact. Maybe something that would have been very useful in the 80s, but which no serves any purpose in these days of ChessBase and ChessAssistant. However, after spending a little time with the book I have changed my mind.
There is almost no textual explanation in this book and it is somewhat out of date (published in 1999, the vast majority of the games are from the 90's). It contains 451 King's Indian games, organized by opening, lightly annotated in Informator style. The annotations range from just a few comments in an entire game, to relatively thorough analysis of some games. They are probably no better (and, some cases, probably not as thorough) as those you could find in ChessBase. But Kalinin's rather minimalistic approach is applied fairly intelligently, and he often has some interesting comments (I guess I should say symbols) at the critical points. I kind of like the approach where the annotator points out the most important or difficult points but generally leaves you to figure the rest out for yourself, although this probably would not be to everyone's taste.
There are two things, IMO, that give Kalinin's book some value and prevent it from being a database dump. First, the games appear to have been chosen as much for their quality and demonstration of typical plans and themes as their theoretical interest. The game selection is excellent, with many games from the top King's Indian players of the 90's. (I just opened the book at a random point and found the games D. Komarov-Kiril Georgiev, Gleizerov-Nunn, Khalifman-Nijboer, and Kasparov-Smirin, a not unrepresentative sample of the level of games in this book.) The selection of games for their instructive value seems quite well done, and I haven't got the feeling (at least so far) going through them that any of the games were included just as "filler."
Second, Kalinin uses a "TM" symbol (stands for "Typical Method") when a particularly instructive or common manoever is played, and I am finding this to be very useful. Many of the games (I am guessing less than half but probably more than a third of the games, although I haven't done a count and might be way off) have the TM sybmol in them, and I find that it serves as a useful signal that something particularly useful is coming up and to pay special attention. Although it didn't strike me as being much when I first looked at this book (just this stupid TM symbol evey now and then), I have come to believe that it is quite a helpful feature and makes this book particularly useful for learning King's Indian themes/ideas. (There is even a little self-test of 50 positions at the end that contain classic King's Indican combinations for both Black and White.)
I like Kalinin's book as a "understanding-based" approach to learning the King's Indian. I wouldn't call it an exceptionally good book; it's not. It's a useful book for someone trying to learn to how to play (or more about playing) in the "style" of the King's Indian, who wants to develop his/her "feeling" for typical King's Indian positions and general understanding of the theory, and who doesn't mind working at it a bit. I find the games rather heavy going (top players, tough battles, difficult opening, and light annotations) and as a result I only look at the book when I am in the mood to make some effort. But I also feel that I am learning some useful things. All in all, not a bad little book, and I think it as a part of the "Teach Yourself In Chess Openings" series it achieves its goals.
However, if you are looking for a cutting edge up-to-date presentation of theory presented in a more digestible format, Golubev's excellent book is definitely a better option.
- Geof
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