if your doing it to earn some cash , its a tough gig , people out there have petra hashes of
kit running for years without catching a block , thats the first REALITY !
Nobody mentioned solo mining, so please stop with the damn lottery thing, you might find an interesting word to throw it around but it's not it's place here.
OP said it was going to mine, and that's it, leaving aside the legal implications with free energy he will get a profit no matter what, he can easily just join a mining pool with 4-5 miners and that's it unless you have a broken usb miner from 6 years ago that will never be making the minimum withdraw nobody is forcing you to solo mine! Plenty of pools that will accept an S9 and I'm more curious about those that don't (well, except for foundry)
Your right i made assumption that the OP would be solo mining
Personally i pool mined for a while and came to realization that the equipment i use and the level of free
solar i can achieve i would skip the $500-$1000 a year i could make and go for solo
Im still learning and should likely shutup and leave ALL the messaging to legeenndddaaarrryyyy folks like yourself