This paper addresses the issues in recognition of the large number of subword units of speech using support vector machines (SVMs). In conventional approaches for multi-class pattern recognition using SVMs, learning involves discrimination of each class against all the other classes. We propose a close-class-set discrimination method suitable for large-class-set pattern recognition problems. In the proposed method, learning involves discrimination of each class against a subset of classes confusable with it and included in its close-class-set. We study the effectiveness of the proposed method in reducing the complexity of multi-class pattern recognition systems based on the one-against-the rest and one-against-one approaches. We discuss the effects of symmetry and uniformity in size of the close-class-sets on the performance for these approaches. We present our studies on recognition of 86 frequently occurring Consonant-Vowel units in a continuous speech database of broadcast news.