From what I know your bet will receive an instant response provided:
- all the inputs to your bet are confirmed
- you add a suitable fee to your transaction
The "advanced" part of the SD website says:
The best way for you to ensure your Bitcoin bet is returned to you quickly, is for you to include the standard fee of .0005btc in your payment transaction. This helps it get noticed by the network faster, and SatoshiDICE picks it up, calculates it, and returns it to you faster
0.0005 BTC is more than the required fee for lots of transactions, and way less than the required fee for others. I don't know whether the website is accurate or not, but if they instantly process all bets with a fee of 0.0005 or more then they're asking for trouble. I can construct a bet that requires a much bigger fee than that, and so will take a long time to confirm.
It would be good to hear the official position on how they decide which bets to process immediately, and to have it explicitly stated on the website.
I can confirm that some bets will not pay out until a confirmation occurs. However the criteria we use for this is proprietary and we intentionally do not describe details about it.
To be sure, this is slightly more draconian that when SD first launched, but this has been a learning process. The threat of double-spends is real, and we're continually trying to achieve the most efficient balance between risk for the house and convenience for players. I will say that I've been extremely happy with our ability to stave off double-spends, and I greatly appreciate that people often bring new rumors or strategies to my attention. There's not a perfect solution to the trade-off, unfortunately, though there is a long-term project in the works that will very nearly solve this problem.
I need to update the site text, for sure. Thanks for the reminder, sometimes you get blind to the stuff you see every day