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 the Upswing Poker Lab training course.
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.
Meet The Upswing Poker Pros
Inactive Lab Coaches
The valuable training content made by these pros is still available in the Upswing Lab