I've had too much laphroaig to understand this tonight but in the morning i will re read this and it might make sense. 
Eight Degrees of Hikaru
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Why not Carlsen? Oh, wait...
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8.
Me - Abhimanyu mishra - brian mcdermott - Anand Mishra - Dov Gorman - Leroy Dubek - Fabiano Caruana - Hikaru Nakamura
Mar 14, 2017
0
#8
i was looking for this thread a few days ago...found two people whos best win were eachother...thought to myself, man sucks if their "road to hikaru" ended with one of these guys
Mar 14, 2017
0
#9
interesting side note, my number is 6, but two of them were closed due to fair play violations :/
Some of you old timers out there might remember the Six Degrees of Bacon game. That's where you pick a random actor or actress and try to find the shortest path to Kevin Bacon through co-starring roles. The shortest path is then that actor's Bacon number. For example, Elvis Presley was in Change of Habit with Ed Asner. Ed Asner was in JFK with Kevin Bacon. So Asner's Bacon number is 1, and Elvis' Bacon number is 2. Kevin Bacon's Bacon number is, of course, 0.
In a similar vein, most players on chess.com have a Hikaru number. It would be exhausting to actually try to find your shortest winning path to Hikaru, so to keep it simple, let's just call it a best win path. Find your best win (according to your chess.com stats, anyway), then find his best win, then find his best win, and so on, until you hit someone whose best win is Hikaru himself.
My Hikaru number is 8. That is, my best win is against a guy whose best win is against a guy whose best win...and so on, until you get to Hikaru. Counting my best win as one, and counting Hikaru at the end, I get 8.