Tarkin - think of mining a block like winning the lottery. It's completely random and everyone is buying billions of tickets per second and only one person can win. So every six minutes, on average, someone gets a jackpot for their trillions of tickets submitted. Sometimes luck runs with you and you find a block fairly quickly, other times, not so much and it takes longer.
We are never working on the same block for more than about 6 minutes. Every time a block is solved everyone, everywhere starts working on the next block at the same time. So everyone is working on a new block every six minutes.
Ah, I got ya and we basically are just awarded in our pool when someone of our pool discovers a block then we all split up the 50btc from that block right?
Therefore the smaller the pool the more reward when a discovered block by someone in that pool is solved but it takes longer...
But if it was a bigger pool, more blocks would be discovered but much less payout chunk...
Its all starting to make sense.
Im a noob and still tryin to wrap my head around the blocks and bla bla bla...started mining this weekend lol..