There are many mining pools for Bitcoin mining. Just like the name sounds, a mining pool represents an aggregate mining team putting their resources together for a combined output. While no one player gets the entire rewards, everyone involved has a greater chance of getting some kind of Bitcoin reward faster than if they worked independently, at least on a probability basis. There is no requirement to join a mining pool. Any miner is quite free to keep working on their own with their equipment. However, the combination of everyone working together simply makes it easier to achieve a faster total hashrate, which is essential in today’s evolved Bitcoin market where more work is needed to achieve results. The amount of computation needs and the speed at which the mining pools work simply outpace most individuals unless they have the resources to match the larger number of rigs needed. Instead, individual miners are better off combining their equipment with existing pools and leveraging the power of numbers to achieve a shared reward portion. In most cases, the mining pool administrator will assign a service that you are to connect to for participation. Through this channel, you will receive what is referred to as a block template. You will need to take the template and start trying to figure out what the next block will result in. This is known as proof of work. If the assumption is correct, then it goes back to the mining pool administrator, gets published, and a reward of bitcoins comes in if indeed accurate. Everyone who participated gets a block reward share based on the number of attempts they sent to the pool.