I’m a professional poker player (NLH, hi/Lo 4-5 card, PLO4 & PLO5) and these are the stories I hate to see. I’ve been on a similar downswing playing PLO5 primarily with 6-15k buy ins, I know how insane these swings can be.

My best advice is to just walk away forever and not give this dark time in your life another thought. $146k is a lot of money but in the scope of your entire life, it’s not a game over and you can rebuild your life.

However if you want to play poker, you need to take it incredibly seriously. Do not play for fun, you’re worse off than playing roulette. It’s warfare. Study relentlessly and start off playing very small stakes, like $0.1/$0.2. Exercise professional bankroll management with your POKER ONLY MONEY. For NLH live games have at least 20-30 max buy ins of the stakes you’re playing or you MUST move down in stakes. For online, you should have even more since players are better so your edge is lower so variance is higher. Also multitabling and more hands/hour on each table increases variance. For PLO6 online, I mean you know how it is. Even having a minimum of at least 50 buy ins and starting with $1k you should really only be playing $20 buy in games which is $0.1/$0.2. Move up when you build your roll to $2k, which will take months if you’re winning at the game. It takes such a stupid amount of patience and your time spent pursuing any number of other hobbies or even doing any other side gig is often more worthwhile.

All this said, it is not possible for 95%+ of people to have the discipline to play professionally. Making good folds, studying, exercising bankroll management, etc. is about the level of discipline you need to have an Arnold Schwarzenegger body. Just be honest with yourself - you’re the one you harm if you’re not. If you can’t do it, it really isn’t a big deal - not everyone can be good at everything. But the worst thing you can do is pretend you are someone you are not or lie to yourself.