you could say the exact same thing just replacing "slashing rakeback" with "raising rake"

It is definitely not the same thing lol.
If you play on gg, your pre-RB WR is the amount you win by playing poker like a normal human being and the RB WR represents how much you've scheduled your life around playing 12h+ days to win as many leaderboards as possible just to maintain what would be an average income if the site simply had lower rake

i stopped playing around 2015....back then Pokerstars was king and GG wasnt even a thing (not that i recall)

How did they suddenly come up out of nowhere and dethrone pokerstars and party poker?

Wtf happened?

stars ****ed up in many ways.
Stars had an amazing RB system but got greedy and decided to quit supernova and offer chests with 2% rb.
Stars had the best software and chose to replace that with aurora which is crap
Things like table cap of only 4 and not offering services to many countries that are allowed on GG are a big factor too

How are places like PaiwangLuo (bovada/ignition) remotely profitable then at any stake when they seem to have similar rake give or take at most levels according to primedope but have no rakeback? Obv there isnt nearly the high stakes but lets say the average 50-200NL -- confused here?

https://www.primedope.com/online-pok...ke-calculator/

At 50NL GG poker supposedly rakes less
At 100NL GG poker supposedly rakes less
At 200NL Ignition rakes 1.5BB less
At 500NL Ignition rakes 1.5BB less

This isnt high stakes but Im a bit confused if were having a convo of how unbeatable games are due to rake but they have rakeback and Ignition doesnt even have rakeback....... what am I missing (i stopped playing quite a long time ago and been dabbling in some local games and brought my interest back)

Am I missing something?

Yes

The information is flowing out of you.

Which is?

Yes. There is RB available through affiliates but only upon creation of a new account.
Also, there have always been some special whales on Ignition. Otherwise people wouldn't play there with a 4 table cap and anonymous tables. Not that easy to have an edge on anyone who isn't a donator in anon environment with no table selection.

RIP in order to get my account back I had to make a new one and did it yesterday....... I dont have a Bovada account anymore though I dont think since that one turned into Ignition back then. I think I can make a Bovada account with RB then -- find official RB affiliates here or where should I best look for that?

Party poker was never on the throne in recent times.. it was a great site but had its issues (software was terrible) and was always second tier to stars but it was very good to grinders in comparison. GG took the opposite route and catered to the fish/whales more which in turn is probably way more profitable for them.

I can put you in touch with someone if you pm me your discord handle.

I can offer RB, though likely lower than whatever other people will offer you. You do run the risk of not getting paid when going through affiliates.

the poker sites won, they realized spending money on advertisement and attracting new players was more profitable than rewarding regulars. jacked up rake and here we are, several sites tried with low rake, and still exist today like swcpoker etc, but they cant compete with the high rake / big advertiser

whats even more amazing is the app club poker scene which has even higher rake but almost 0 overhead, no security, lots of scams etc, yet they still use insane rake like 3bb 5%...