Oh my god it's great to see you again Vernon. You have always been a valuable contributor to this forum.

So I played a few hours at the 0.5/1e game and it was a total nitfest. It was so bad that half of the table were old Greek nits, and out of the other half 3 kids were actually watching poker videos while playing. Almost everyone were tight. And most of these people were short-stacked.

It was far worse than any games I had played back then. In the end I won some tiny pots and cashed out about even at the end.
I will check out the 2-5 game later and hopefully the game would be better.

Rake is always an issue but it should be beatable. The rake has increased for me from $7 to $8 but my winrate has not suffered.

Just learn the correct starting hands to play in each position and 3b ranges - and you should have a major edge over any low stakes player.

One thing i've noticed a lot of low stakes players do is open 4 - 5x preflop which is just crazy bad. If they limp a lot and all of a sudden open $20 in a 1/3 or $30 in a 2/5 game they have a pretty big hand so I have avoided a lot of coolers/going broke by just flatting with hands like JJ or QQ vs that sizing. The amount of times they had KK+ and I only lose like $100 or less with QQ is quite astonishing. A lot of poor low stakes players will pretty much tell you what they have if you pay attention.