Right. Chain redirects = bad.
However, in the same video of Matt Cutts, he does say that the overall amount doesn't matter, and that's what I was talking about in first part of my previous answer.
Now, let's crunch some numbers to show you that the number of no-chain redirects doesn't matter.
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Assume that we are in perfect world, so all given manufacturer given numbers actually right and all operations per second are actually operations per second
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Lets say that standard hosting server is 2GHz power = 2*10^9 computations per second
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Since all htaccess work/computations are strictly on a server side (bots/browsers just send request to server for response if page should be redirected), the only time which can slow down the request is server response time.
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Match computations are always considered low computation power processes.
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so, let's say you have htacces with 1 000 000 redirect rules, server keeps it in memory to do match computations when bots make requests, it means that 2GHz server has to have 2000 requests per second to just START struggling.
So, do you have 2000 requests per second to your website and 1 million redirect rules?
P.S. All number above are very rough approximations
P.P.S. If you really wanna see if your server is/ would struggle - login into web host manager, go to server status and info, look and see how much of your server power is usually being used. Usually that number is lower than 6-7% at 90% of the time.
Hope this clarify some things