No, its been at least two weeks. I switched my main pool two weeks ago and switched again a few days ago, and have been monitoring them all to see if I made the right decision. MtRed has consistently made more than bitcoins.lc would have for me up from the time i switched until a few days ago, and now deepbit is doing the same. Bitcoins.lc before that point was making me a LOT more than I would have made at other pools. I would be right back to bitcoins.lc as I really liked the pool except for the no full payout thing if it was earning me the most for my mining. The best day bitcoins.lc had in the last 2 weeks was the 13th, and I would have made ~.45btc. Instead I was mining at deepbit and mined .47BTC. Every other day pretty much I would have been off by at LEAST .1 BTC mining at bitcoins.lc, which is 20%, save for the 5th of july. On the fifth of july I was able to mine half at MtRed and half at bitcoins.lc and really made a fairly good gain, even though I would have been better off probably just staying at bitcoins.lc for that one day.
This post documents a basic misunderstanding of the variance of Bitcoin. The past luckiness of a pool, or even how long the current round is, has
nothing to do with how much you will make in future rounds. Every single time your computer trys a block hash, it has a very small chance of solving it that is always the same, a chance that is
only based on the difficulty setting of Bitcoin. Your average earnings are completely based on how many shares you submit in a round, which is completely based on your hashrate. Whether you solo mine, or join the biggest pool, your expected earnings from your personal hash rate against this 'difficulty' problem will always average out to be the same. Only pool fees (and rejected shares or downtimes) can affect your expected earnings; and you can buffer against possible pool downtimes by running a second miner per GPU pointed at a different pool.
The same fallacies persist in other games of chance, like how some people think a slot machine (fruit machine) in a casino might be "hot", or "due for a win", when the chance of you winning is purely random, just like every hash the pool trys, and has nothing to do with the past (this inability to recognize bad human intuition and apply logic is a driving factor in gambling addiction, since to even play a game once with losing odds is illogical, and to play more than once only reduces the variance and further guarantees your loss). It would be like if I had a coin flip game where I flip the coin and heads wins. Just because the coin landed on tails four times in a row doesn't mean that going to someone else's coin-flip game is going to get you any more wins in the future. You could make the argument that maybe my coin or dice aren't perfect and favor one side, but bitcoin has perfect dice.