No, no, no, no, NO! If you think that, you've completely missed the point.
There is no way to trick this strategy; it cannot be cajoled into a corner, because it knows all of them already. This strategy isn't optimal in the sense of being good, it's optimal in the sense that it cannot be tricked. Think instead of tic-tac-toe for a moment. Would you say that you could always beat someone at tic-tac-toe if you know their play-style? Of course not, because it's very easy to use a play-style wherein you can force a draw, always. Well, that's exactly what they've done here (with one important caveat, below). But what about randomness, you ask? That's why they need ~10^14 states! It doesn't care how the cards are shuffled, because it cannot be tricked on any ordering of the cards. It doesn't matter; the randomness of the deck just selects which one, but the strategy will work on whichever one is picked.
Now, the caveat comes in the form that the probability of winning is simply bounded below at 1/2. A slightly suboptimal player with 10x as much seed money will probably have an advantage just by being able to bankrupt this strategy. A mediocre player with 10000x as much money will also have a good chance of bankrupting this strategy before the guarantee kicks in. Think of having more money as a sort of "complexity measure"; this strategy forces an opponent to rely on having a greater investment just to have a chance, sort of like asymmetric crypto forces an opponent to have exponentially much compute power to read your messages.
This caveat is because they're sort of mashing up the techniques of deterministic game theory, with a probabilistic game. Nonetheless, the advantage is there. If you're playing a completely unknown adversary with equal funding, and you want to do your best, this is the way to go. End of story. Of course things get interesting in reality because no adversary is completely unknown; you can always try to Vizzini your way into the opponent's head but this is a dangerous move which can backfire drastically.