How does pool mining distribute work and rewards among miners?

In pool mining, a central pool server manages communication with the Kaspa node and hands out work to individual miners at a reduced difficulty level, then collects their solutions and shares rewards when the pool finds a valid block. The server requests block templates from the node and lowers the difficulty threshold before distributing those templates, so miners can find solutions more frequently and prove they are contributing work. Occasionally, by chance, a miner's solution turns out to be strong enough to meet the node's full network difficulty — at that point the pool submits the block on the miner's behalf and splits the reward among all miners who were actively working at that time, according to the pool's payout scheme (common schemes include PPS and PPLNS). Understanding this matters because the payout scheme the pool uses directly affects how consistently and how fairly you receive your share of rewards.