Interestingly there is a significant probability that SatoshiDice itself will loose a lot of money, despite it's house edge. I think that is why they have had to decrease bet limits and increase the house edge.
Look how they lost over 3000 BTC ($15,000) in a 7 day period (June 2nd to June 9th):
http://i.imgur.com/ru1Gz.pngIt looks to me like a large amount of those losses stemmed from a single bet:
http://blockchain.info/tree/7470279
Follow that bet, its winnings, and the various change outputs, and you find a sequence of large bets with unusually high win rates. I found 45 "lessthan 32000" bets with 26/45 winning (58%) when it should be 48%, and 19 "lessthan 48000" bets with 15/19 winning (79%) when it should be 73%. The bets are mostly 50 or 100 BTC each.
My knowledge of statistics isn't good enough to work out whether this is reasonable variance, or whether it's suspicious but I suspect that I don't have enough data points to draw any safe conclusions.
For situations like these it's hard to set a threshold of probability. For example, according to our current understanding of quantum mechanics, it is possible but highly unlikely that Ella Fitzgerald will appear next to you right now. There's an overwhelmingly larger yet still incredibly small possibility that most of the particles in my nose will "teleport" somewhere else. I ignore this possibility in my everyday life and assume that my nose will continue to exist in its current form because the probability of mass localized long-distance quantum teleportation is so small.
To find the probability of "beating the odds," we can use a
binomial
probability
distribution
function. It's basically Bernoulli's experiment.
The probability of winning
exactly 26/45 bets on 48% odds is binompdf(45, .48, 26) =
5.05%, which is fairly reasonable.
The probability of winning
at least 26/45 bets on 48% odds is binompdf(45, .48, 26)+binompdf(45, .48, 27)+...+binompdf(45, .48, 45) =
12.23%, which is between 1/8 and 1/9 odds.
This makes sense when you consider that 48% is close to 1/2, and 26/45 is close to 1/2 as well.
For the second data set:
18.35% for exactly 15/19 wins on 73% odds
38.71% for at least 15/19 wins on 73% odds
I am happy to post more technical details, such as the source code of the program I used to sum up the density functions or the output answers to more decimal places, but I suspect it's not really wanted.
TL;DR no, it's not suspicious, just unlucky that it happened on such large bets.