Cloud mining - newbie questions

[poornamelessme]

Apologies in advance if these questions seem very newbie-ish...

I've been experimenting with cloudmining a little bit, and figured I'd give the Azure trial a shot. I picked Darkcoin to go after, got three setups going (8/8/4) and put two to work in the main pool, one in the lottery pool. What I am wondering about is the rate listed vs the actual rate earned.

What I mean by that is, in the pool info, it may say something like User (me) DRK/Day 9.5  and the bitcoin equivalent afterwards. Yet after close to a day, the actual DRK I've earned is probably closer to 1-2 coins. Why is there such a disparity? Or is the approx. just a guess over a longer time period, or if I hit a block, or something like that? Or am I misunderstanding what the info means?

[HammerHedd]

I've been watching that, too. I think that the pool stats are a bit screwy because the Darkcoin algorithm is different, and the Kimoto pool difficulty adjustment makes it difficult to estimate difficulty.

But then, I'm no mathematician.