By the way, this is the mind bending implications of statistics... I had to work through this myself to convince myself of the security implications of block frequencies (i.e. Litecoin vs. Bitcoin)...

I convinced myself quite strongly that mining is never deterministic, which has this tensions between 'gut feeling' and reality. At first, it made sense to me that once a miner begins mining with a set nonce pattern, the number of hashes to a solution becomes deterministic... however, after further reflection this is not the case.

A miner can hash x hashes, but is absolutely no hashes closer to a solution....

This is why a miner withholding a block gains no advantage.