Yesterday, I saw an interesting thing: an independent miner actually mined block 944306, instantly earning 3.128 BTC, which was roughly $222k at the time. This kind of thing is really about luck for miners; this is the second time in the past week that an independent miner successfully found a block through CKPool. I think this shows that even individual miners still have a chance; you don't necessarily have to join a large mining pool. Such news should be a good boost for the mining community, after all, everyone hopes to encounter such a lucky moment.