It's in your best interest to vote for the pool with the lowest votes that still qualify for validator status (assuming pool fees are equal)
Thanks for the advice.
So there is an interesting tension in trying to figure out which pool to assign your votes in order to maximize your reward. You want to target the pool that has the smallest number of votes to qualify as a validator but not so small that they risk getting kicked off the validator list.
Yeah, it will be interesting over time to see how the competition between pools plays out. As a pool becomes more popular it will have to balance incoming votes with the number of validators it is running. If not it will have to turn voters away and/or reduce per share payout. And it will only get more expensive to burn the 1000 SEM to register new delegates to balance out the votes.
Because the validator distinction is binary, we could see some fierce competition among the validators vying for the 100th spot. Now I'm imagining all sorts of pool promotions and deal making between whale voters as startup validators try to take the #100 spot from already established validators. After mainnet launches I expect much more focus on, and analysis of, the various validator dynamics... should be fun to watch.