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I just wanted to ask a question about dueling/its history. The user with the lucky clover trophy has a record of 789 wins/429 losses at the time of writing this post. Now obviously this would be impossible to achieve if the chance of winning a duel was fixed at 50%. So is there/has there ever been any 'strategy' in any of the dueling systems that improves upon the 50% odds?

Well, I tried to figure out a pattern when I was dueling against cysid, so that worked for me, but sometimes it failed on me. To earn more points, I would rather rate games than risk losing points.  

It is blind luck and duelling noobs at RPS. There is a 49% chance of winning against cysid when betting any amount of points on a game of toggle and this has been researched. See [1][2]

It's worth noting that members who have had and often have the lucky dueller trophy duel noobs at RPS and always choose something that beats 66% of noob choices so their chance of winning goes up. As well as being able to convince the noob to choose something then they can pretty much guarantee a win. Duelling against cysid forever and obtaining >60% win rate is extremely close to impossible.

Oh yeah, noobs are limited to Rock, Paper, Scissors. All advanced choices therefore must have either a 1/3 or a 2/3 chance of beating a noob. By dueling noobs who clearly do not have enough points to have unlocked any RPS choices other than the basic three, and by picking an "advanced" RPS option that beats 2/3 of the basic three, you can increase your odds to 66.7%. Factoring in deviation and the occasional duel against a more experienced site member, this explains Briar_Rose's win ratio of 64.8%.

Also, looking at Chanbot's dueling record, and the variation of his win rate over time, I think the odds of beating cysid are probably exactly 50%. The variation in win rate (5-8 losses in succession) is by no means abnormal.

If I'm correct, the amount of choices in RPS actually doesn't matter. As with regular rock, paper, scissors, there is a 33,3% (repeating) chance to either win, lose, or draw. The other choices just add a bit of flavour to the game.

I don't think that's the case. Let me explain:

An experienced player can use at least "Water" in addition to the basic three choices. A noob can only use rock, paper, or scissors. Let's say the experienced player chooses "Water". If the noob chooses rock or scissors, the experienced player wins. The noob wins only if he chooses paper. There is no "drawing" scenario. Therefore the experienced player has a 67% chance of winning, and the noob has a 34% chance of winning.

E: Another easy way to see that the chances do not remain at 34% is to realise that if each player has n choices, the chance of a draw is only 1/n.