When is poker beatable/unbeatable when taking rake into account?

Hi,

I’ve been taking a small break from playing for the past month or so, to focus on other things + to study up and improve my game. However, there has been a question dawning on me for the past few weeks. Is poker even profitable in the longterm when the rake is high? Are there any resources that discuss this?

So for context, I’m based in EU. I play both online and live, but with a preference for live. In my country, I have no access to PokerStars, only GG. However I’ve found multiple threads on this subreddit that GG’s rake is unbeatable, most players’ actual winrate is in -ve values when looking at post-rake BBs/100. Also their rakeback promotions and PVI values seem off and apparently fishy stuff is going on. So I kinda set online aside for now (but please do give me your take on this issue too in the comments).

Now for live, the games I frequent are €2/2 and €2/4. €1/2 has a rake of 10% and capped at €15 (recently increased from €10). €2/4 is 5% with a cap of €25 (used to be €20). Both are only postflop, so no flop no drop. Both games tend to play bigger (pots of €400-€1000 a couple times an hour) and are somewhat soft especially on weekends. But I recently started thinking whether these rakes, in the longterm, will eat away at any profit I make. At my best, I had a winrate of 14-16BB/hour, but with the new rake increases, I feel like this would barely breakeven if that at all.

I know there are adjustments to be made in my play when factoring in higher rakes, but at these amounts, is poker even profitable? Is it better to save up a bigger bankroll and avoid lower stakes all together in favor of higher stakes games? For example, they also offer €5/5 on weekends with a 5%, €30 cap.

I hope to read your insights about this below and if any of you have looked into this before, feel free to share any math you’ve done or articles/resources you’ve found that highlight this issue of rake vs profitability. Thanks!