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At the moment you are correct. But pool mining software is very easy to configure and maintain, and anyway within a few months there will be many more rigs mining at this rate - and thus justifying using the pool.

When I was running mining rigs in 2011, I used BTCGuild as they had very reasonable fees.

He risks not finding a block at all, and wasting his early advantage.

This kind of mining won't last very long because soon more people will have ASICs and it will become much harder to compete.

A mining pool significantly lowers the volatility and yields a more consistent rate of return. The difference in expected return isn't much: an effective fee of approximately 1%.

He may be using the pool for bragging rights.

I would assume it's much easier to join a pool rather than create his own pool for his devices to use.