During the TV-fueled boom of no-limit hold’em and around Chris Moneymaker’s WSOP main event win, friends and I would travel every year to Vegas to play in the side games and satellites leading up to the WSOP. Staying in the (now gone) Imperial Palace for $25/night, it was relatively easy to beat the single-table satellites by enough to pay for the flights the first Friday and then grind out an overall profit on the rest of the days.
That’s a special case of “big advantage in skill” in the sense that the WSOP/TV boom drew a bunch of players with way more aspiration than skill/experience and the games were easily beatable by players of typical home game winner level of skill as a result.
The typical big-casino rake isn't that large. From memory (it has been 2 years since I've physically been in a poker room), the typical rake at a full 9-player table at the Encore (Everett, MA, USA) worked out to ~$12-15/hour per person.
For a professional dealer, good chips, and a continuous flow of players, that seems like a pretty fair price to pay.
If all the players sit down with $1000 and play for 5 hours, the casino will have taken approx. 6% of the total bankroll. It's not about what is fair, it's whether you are actually skilled enough to beat the other players AND the rake over the long term. Most people can't.
That’s a special case of “big advantage in skill” in the sense that the WSOP/TV boom drew a bunch of players with way more aspiration than skill/experience and the games were easily beatable by players of typical home game winner level of skill as a result.