Your reading is correct, and the article is nonsense (well, not the part that reports the data, but the part that tries to draw conclusions from it), particular

Your reading is correct, and the article is nonsense (well, not the part that reports the data, but the part that tries to draw conclusions from it), particularly since the unbeatable strategy is to play purely at random (the game is a variant of rock paper scissors). Fun factoid: humans are bad random number generators (our brains are optimized for finding patterns, not for scrambling them), so if you ever have to play iterated rock paper scissors (including the variant in the article) against a better opponent (so you want to fall back on a randomized strategy) without external tools, the best thing to do is use a memorized pseudorandom sequence (the first dozen digits of pi, some simple hash function of words from your favorite song lyrics etc.)