Yes, I like slush's pool as well. 

My question is more to determine if there are benefits to mining on more than 1 pool at the same time, such as getting better overall throughput/shares, getting better payout from 2 pools combined  versus just 1, somehow gaming the "last n shares" formulas that many pools use, etc.

I'm wondering what the optimal cgminer change management strategies are for multi-pool mining.  I currently mine on slush's and bitminter.  Specifically, my questions are:

1- Is it better to mine exclusively on 1 pool and keep the second as a fail-over only in case of issues with first, or to distribute the mining effort across 2 pools?

2- If one wants to mine on both pools simultaneously, then what are the differences between the following settings, and what's the current thinking on which is better?
     1: Round Robin
     2: Rotate
     3: Load Balance
     4: Balance


Apologies if there's already a thread on this.  Thanks.

Porsche sold for bitcoins recently.  See http://www.businessinsider.com/texas-family-we-sold-this-porsche-last-night-for-300-bitcoins-2013-4

So I just discovered the benefit of setting up multiple pools in cgminer.  With Slush's getting DDOS'ed today, I registered with bitminter and configured cgminer to load-balance between the 2 pools.  With slush down, it looks like I'm using bitminter exclusively for now.

Other than failover, are there any other advantages to load-balancing across multiple pools?  Pros or Cons?

I'm new to bitcoins and bitcoin mining (2 days).  I have a background both in computer science and in equities trading/algorithmic trading.  I'm wondering if I'm too late to the mining scene, given that asics are here or imminent.  Currently playing around with an HD7770 board, getting 200Mh/sec.  Electric rates are not an issue for me (have access to free).  Wondering if I should pick up some used fpga boards.  I calculate that I'll recoup in 2 - 3 months, but wondering if difficulty will increase by then....