Watching the chain to see if we win a double race... likely the only adrenaline-inducing thing left in mining.
Watching the pool you mine in lose that race... likely the worst feeling left in mining.
Alas it was a foregone conclusion. It wasn't much of an orphan race at all, so even the fast block change code in the pool couldn't have prevented us losing that one.
For people wondering what he's talking about, we had a block orphaned. What happened was the block had already been solved by another pool, but a miner submitted a stale share 700ms later that was also a block solve. There was almost no chance it was going to be successful, but the pool will try to use it as a block solve anyway, forcing bitcoind to accept the block, in the unlikely event it wins the orphan race (or solves two blocks back to back). Realistically the pool can just ignore it since it was stale but we'll try anything to get a block.
Here are the pool logs where you can see it says it's submitting a stale share block solve:
[2018-06-14 18:11:25.412] Block hash changed to 00000000000000000037e634734805d4a48f7d50125ecc55a2f137e2722a32f3
[2018-06-14 18:11:26.100] Possible stale share block solve diff 10130992321539.841797 !
[2018-06-14 18:11:26.100] Submitting block data!
[2018-06-14 18:11:26.107] SUBMIT BLOCK RETURNED: inconclusive
[2018-06-14 18:11:26.171] Hash for block height 527471 confirms block was ACCEPTED
[2018-06-14 18:11:26.176] Solved block 527471 by 36JMs8rogpizjkkp6eeKMmm3SLbSNo5H9V.0
[2018-06-14 18:11:26.176] User 36JMs8rogpizjkkp6eeKMmm3SLbSNo5H9V:{"hashrate1m": "142P", "hashrate5m": "142P", "hashrate1hr": "136P", "hashrate1d": "83.7P", "hashrate7d": "56.6P"}
[2018-06-14 18:11:26.176] Worker 36JMs8rogpizjkkp6eeKMmm3SLbSNo5H9V.0:{"hashrate1m": "107P", "hashrate5m": "107P", "hashrate1hr": "102P", "hashrate1d": "73.4P", "hashrate7d": "54.6P"}
[2018-06-14 18:11:26.272] Block hash changed to 0000000000000000001bc87b3d85516a0b00bf873a43dbef986125c269c210d8
[2018-06-14 18:32:31.978] Hash for block height 527471 confirms block was ORPHANED
At the end the pool sees that it lost the orphan race and moves to the new block. Unfortunate, but one of the realities of mining. The only fortunate part is the pool code already takes into account what should happen in the case of an orphan, to prevent the interleaved payouts getting out of sync. It will also NOT artificially reset the diff back to 0% since we didn't win a block.
You can see the full details of what would have been a block in this sadly named block file:
http://ckpool.org/blocks/527471.orphaned