The best pool rules, imho are more or less in the following order:

1) Lowest fees

1a) Shares transaction fees

1b) Any pool that does NOT share transaction fees should be rejected from consideration (which, unfortunately, is most, if not all, Chinese based pools)

2) Reasonable variance – You need to get paid often enough to be happy. This is a tough one.

Variance is the close cousin to “Luck”.

The luckier a pool is, the more blocks it finds relative to its hashing speed, and the less variance it will have. But its not a real thing! “Luck” could change any microsecond.

“Luck” is just mathematical statistics – over a long enough time period, all pools will average out to 100% luck.

Luck Statistik for 14 Blocks

You need to understand Variance:

A big pool finds more blocks, but distributes the earnings out to more miners.

A small pool is just the reverse: it finds fewer blocks, but pays those earnings to fewer people. Over the long run, Rule #1, well, rules.

3) Wind-up/Wind-down time – Most pools use some leveling algorithm.

4) User Interface – That doesn’t matter much if you have a few miners. If you have hundreds, the difference can be thousands of dollars a Year.

Notes:

A) In the long run #2 & #3 really don’t matter much. Both pools show your hashing rate in minutes, but would continue longer if you changed in the future.

B) Bigger is not better. Your profit will be determined mostly by rule #1 – lower fees mean more profit.

C) More, smaller, pools is healthier for the blockchain. If you can live with the variance, support the pool with the longest average payout you are happy with.

D) Relatively small pools with long build up time. You MIGHT suffer due to difficulty changes while you build up.

E) For smaller pools. Make sure you understand what happens to your efforts (based on their scoring system) when a difficulty change occurs.

Best Pool Rules

"The nature of Bitcoin is such that once version 0.1 was released, the core design was set in stone for the rest of its lifetime.”

Satoshi Nakamoto