You play too many hands. Here is what your VPIP should be.

Every hand you play preflop is a purchase. You are buying a chance at the pot, and the price is the blinds, the raises, and every awkward postflop decision that follows. Players who see 40% of flops are not looser than players who see 24%. They are worse shoppers.

At a nine-handed table, a winning player voluntarily puts money in around 18% to 24% of hands. Six-handed, 22% to 28%. The live 1/2 player who never met a suited hand they didn't like runs 40% and up, and the gap between those numbers is not style. It is the single largest lever on your win rate, because a loose preflop range poisons every street after it.

Why the extra hands lose

The hands between "clearly playable" and "clearly trash" — Q8 suited, K5 suited, J9 offsuit — share a flaw: when they hit, they hit second best. Q8 suited flops a pair of queens and loses to AQ and KQ. It flops a flush and loses a stack to the ace-high flush. These hands do not lose because they never connect. They lose because their good flops are other hands' better flops.

Position makes the purchase worse. The same marginal hand that is a small loser on the button is a large one under the gun, because six players act after you for the entire hand, and every postflop street starts with you guessing.

The fix is a range, not a feeling

Decide what you play from each seat before you sit down. It does not need to be perfect. It needs to be written, so the 11 PM version of you cannot renegotiate it hand by hand.

Early position: pairs, big broadways, AJ suited and better. Roughly the top 15%.

Middle and cutoff: add suited broadways, AT, suited connectors down to 76s.

Button: the widest seat in poker, around 40% against blinds who fold — but wide is not "any two." The button open of 92 offsuit is where win rates go to die.

Fold the pretty junk everywhere. Suited two-gappers, offsuit aces below AT, king-x below K9 suited: these are the hands your loosest sessions are made of.

How to know if this is your leak

Track your next 200 hands and count how many you voluntarily played. Above 30% at a full table? Every fifth hand you play is a hand a winning player folds. Cut those, and note what happens to your average postflop decision: fewer dominated top pairs, fewer third-best flushes, fewer rivers where you already know the call is bad while making it.