key squares

I'm still struggling identifying how a square becomes a "key" square-what this means, etc...if c4 becomes a key square for example, must I challenge for it or can I abandon it and focus on another part of the board?

thanks for any clarification-

Jonathan

It's not something you can work backwards from. In other words you either regonize the features that give rise to the importance of the square or you don't.

In that way the naming of squares as "key" is pointless. Either the audience already has reached the same conclusion, or they haven't. Naming them doesn't change anything.

As for why a square is key, some learned tactical and/or strategic elements makes it so. In other words it's not something the speaker or the audience has discovered during (short term) analysis as much as they've understood it to be so thanks to the knowledge in their long term memory... and perhaps a little basic calculation.

So what can you do? Take a position, often it's an endgame where a square is named "key", and analyze it. Don't give much credit to what the annotator or engine says, try to understand it on your own terms. Play out the position a few times. Of course you can use the text or engine to help, but they're supplementary. If it's still confusing, wait a few weeks, months, or years, and try again.

Objectively no.

But as is the case anytime you're losing no matter what you do, you might choose a bad path on purpose for practical reasons.