I agree that there are only 1,292 'equivalence classes' that matter
for 9/6 JOB, but since oracles are in short supply these days it's
impossible to identify these classes ahead of time.....so you always
end up calculating through a larger number of hands and hold
strategies than are absolutely necessary. 
Thanks for sharing.
-Chris
路路路
--- In vpFREE@yahoogroups.com, Steve Jacobs <jacobs@x> wrote:
The real trick is to partition the hands into equivalence classes
that are derived from the payoff schedule. The optimal strategy
for 9/6 JoB ends up including only 1292 draws that can be
distinguished based on the resulting probability distribution for
payoffs. So, if you had an omniscient oracle that could partition
the starting hands into 1292 piles and tell you "these are the
differences that matter" then you'd only have to test one hand
from each pile in order to find the optimal strategy. Of course,
other games have different levels of complexity. For 10/7
Double Bonus, the max-EV strategy has only 785 classes of
starting hand, but the "best shot at royal" strategy has 827
classes and the min-risk strategy has 781 equivalence classes.
Clearly, the optimal partitioning of hands depends not only
on the payoff schedule but on the player's objective, but that
would be hard to take into account without help from an
omniscient oracle.