Meet The Upswing Poker Pros
Fried Meulders -"mynameiskarl"

I realize this will break some of your hearts, but I have to come clean. I am “mynameiskarl” but my name is in fact not karl.

Hi Upswing Poker! I’m Fried Meulders, an online poker pro from Belgium, “known” as mynameiskarl on Pokerstars.

I won’t be offended if you’ve never heard of me before, that’s what this is for.

I have been playing 6-max NL Hold’em cash games on Pokerstars professionally since the start of 2012. I have played more than 3.4M hands with an average stake of over 500NL and been beating the games with a winrate of over 3.7bb/100 hands.

Before I played poker, I grew up playing that nerdy card game Magic: The Gathering.

It, just like poker, is a skill game with a random element. It teaches you to make the right decisions based on the limited information you have. It teaches you that a decision is right or wrong based on the process used to make that decision, and not based on the outcome. It teaches you to be less results oriented; something most of humanity is suffering from.

(BONUS: it also “protects” you from being distracted by the fairer sex and all that)

Very useful skills for life in general I’d say, but more in particular: a perfect starting point to move on to poker.

I was lucky in a sense to only really get to know poker in my last year of college, so I was still able to finish my degree as an engineer in computer sciences.

Somehow, I managed to overcome shitty bankroll management and establish myself at 100NL of some “untracked euro sites”. This was mainly done through stumbling upon a Belgian poker forum with an awesome community that was very helpful and didn’t hold back on giving advice on poker hands. Some of these guys are my best friends today.
I think at Upswing, we all hope the Facebook group & forum can be that kind of community.

After college, I started working as an IT consultant. Grinding that during the day, grinding poker during the evenings. Rinse & repeat. The dream was to play poker for a living, but I wasn’t there until I went for it at the start of 2012. Rolled for midstakes and never looked back.

I was never a big multi-tabler, so I loved the convenience of Zoom poker when that was introduced on Pokerstars. And that’s what I have continued playing.

Ever since these “GTO solvers” (most famous examples are Piosolver and Simple Postflop) were introduced, this has been my main way of studying the game. This means I will try to approach the game form a GTO-perspective, but this doesn’t mean I’m afraid to make some exploitative plays to exploit the leaks my opponents display.

I am still playing the same games for a living, but I was very honored when Doug asked me to be a cash game coach for this website called UpswingPoker.com.

So that’s where we are now. I am active in the private Facebook group, answering some of your questions. I will frequently make Play & Explain videos, most (or all) of them at Zoom 500 on Pokerstars. And once in a while you’ll get a bigger Module from me, where I zoom in (pun intended, obv) on a specific aspect of the game we all love.