What Is the Role of a Mining Pool in Mitigating the Risk Associated with High Difficulty?

A mining pool allows individual miners to combine their hash rate to increase their collective chance of finding a block. When the pool finds a block, the reward is split among participants proportional to their contributed hash rate.

This provides a more predictable and steady stream of smaller rewards, reducing the variance (risk) of going long periods without earning anything due to high network difficulty. It essentially smooths out the revenue curve.