Comment by vntok

Your mental model is wrong. Read the post again, slowly, and it will probably make more sense to you. Here are the relevant bits

> This gives us the string `00000034` to uniquely represent this specific set of promotions, without information loss.

> How many possible strings are there? Generating this by brute force, we end up with 495 distinct strings

> This can be stored in 9 bits for each side

Hint: 2^9 is 512 and 512 > 495