The 49.5% is real. I tested it.
I'm an ex-pit boss, 23 years on casino floors. I built an open-source NIST SP 800-22 test suite and ran 250,000+
rounds of Stake's provably fair outcomes through 25 statistical tests. The distribution matches exactly what the math
says it should be.
But here's where players get tripped up: 49.5% doesn't mean you win roughly half the time in any given session. It
means over tens of thousands of bets, your win rate converges toward 49.5%. In a session of 50 or 100 bets, you can
easily hit 40% or 60% wins. That's not rigged, that's variance.
The 0.5% difference between 49.5% and 50% is the house edge. On a $1 bet, that's half a cent per bet going to the
house. Sounds tiny, but multiply by millions of bets per day across all players and that's how they make money. They
don't need to cheat.
If you want proof for your own account: rotate your server seed, export the old one, and I'll run a free audit on your
personal data. Everything is open source and verifiable.