You could always fire up a p2pool node, we are still chugging along....
Instead of a lottery ticket you get a bunch of smaller payouts, but over the long term, unless you hit the jackpot, will pay out more, and still contributes to decentralization...
You will never mine 25
BTC at the pool. And some mining hardware (like Bitmain...) can't work with p2pool correctly without some kind of additional shamanistic dances.