Why More Than One Pool

[sylance]

I noticed many people have their miners signed up for more than one pool... what's the reason behind this.  Does it give more coins in the end or is it to spread the 'risk' around?

[Zanatos666]

Some of it is for backup purposes so if a pool goes down, they are not losing time mining.  Some people want to split their mining to get better "luck" if they are using DGM to calculate their earnings vs PPS.  If a pool gets stuck with an unfortunately long round then they are getting less out of it so this allows them to cut that loss down.

In the end PPS and DGM are going to yield about the same results in the long run.  DGM has the chance of getting lucky and getting better payouts quicker, but also you take the risk of getting unlucky as well, where PPS is steady and constant. 

I personally use PPS because I like the consistency and being able to predict what I am going to get without any surprises (except for network difficulty increases).  I have backup pools setup in case my main pool goes down so that I am not losing mining time.