Theory
King and pawn endings are unforgiving: there’s no piece activity to compensate for an error, just precise calculation. The single most important concept is the square of the pawn — a simple geometric test for whether a king can catch a passed pawn before it queens, calculable at a glance once you’ve drilled it.
Opposition — kings facing each other with an odd number of squares between them — decides who’s forced to give ground first in a huge number of these positions. Understanding opposition is the difference between winning and drawing a position that looks identical on the board.
Model Games
Rather than a single model game, king and pawn endings are best learned from composed studies — Reti’s famous king-and-pawn study, where a seemingly too-slow king catches two separate passed pawns, is the classic introduction to counting technique over pure calculation.
Practice Positions
Set up a king one square outside the square of an enemy passed pawn and calculate, without moving pieces, whether it can catch the pawn. Then add a second passed pawn and recalculate — the answer is rarely what intuition suggests.