I do not live where live poker or online poker is legal. But it seems pretty straightforward to me.....you dont want to play live because you dont want to catch covid19. If you were strictly a live poker player before covid19, then your reasoning would be you didnt play online precovid, and you certainly arent going to start now. If you did play online pre covid and that was part of your self-employed income, you could still play online and as long as you dont reach the threshold, you could still claim unemployment.

If you could get approved as a professional poker player during the pandemic why couldn't you at anytime lol. Online poker never went anywhere. Did anyone actually get approved claiming as a professional poker player?

I am assuming you are talking about getting approved for unemployment. The reason why you couldnt previously get approved for unemployment as a poker player is that until Covid19, people that were self-employed could not be approved for unemployment benefits. Because of the circumstances surrounding Covid19, self-employed people can now receive unemployment. If you file your taxes as self-employed poker player, you should be able to receive unemployment benefits just like any other self-employed person.

As far as online poker goes, there are what, 4 states where online poker is legal? So that leaves a lot of people out there that are eligible as self-employed poker players. And I think you could reasonably argue that even if online poker is available in your state, you could still file for unemployment as a self-employed poker player.

Yeah, you had to be rejected for unemployment in order to get the initial PUA.
So under normal circumstances, you/we/I wouldn't be eligible for unemployment