VPIP, PFR, and Finding Your Leaks

Two numbers that describe your whole game

Poker tracking rests on two statistics. VPIP (Voluntarily Put money In Pot) is the percentage of hands where you chose to commit chips preflop — calling or raising, not counting your forced blinds. It measures how loose or tight you are. PFR (PreFlop Raise) is the percentage of hands where you raised preflop. It measures how aggressive your looseness is. Together they compress thousands of decisions into a two-number signature — players talk about being '22/18' the way pilots talk about heading and altitude.

What healthy looks like

For 6-max cash games, a solid tight-aggressive profile lands somewhere around 22/18 — VPIP in the low-to-mid 20s, PFR a few points behind it. That's not an arbitrary target: it's roughly what you get by simply playing the position-based ranges from lesson 6 and entering pots with a raise per lesson 9 (see the VPIP article below for a fuller breakdown by game type). The exact numbers matter less than the neighborhood — 22/18 and 25/20 are both fine; 45/8 and 12/10 are both problems.

The gap is the leak

The distance between your VPIP and PFR is the fastest leak detector in poker. A small gap (22/18) means when you play a hand, you raise it — aggressive, healthy. A huge gap like 30/8 tells a precise story: this player calls with 22% of their hands. That's the calling-station signature — limping, cold-calling raises, check-calling down — and it loses for the exact reason lesson 8 explained: calls have only one way to win. If your own gap is more than about 6-8 points, that gap is almost certainly where your money is going.

The top five micro-stakes leaks

When players audit their own play, the same five leaks surface over and over:

• •Limping — entering pots by calling (lesson 9 covered why this burns money).
• •Cold-calling too much — flatting raises with hands that play badly, instead of 3-betting or folding.
• •Too few 3-bets — flatting QQ and AK 'to see a flop safely', missing their value.
• •Paying off stations — calling river bets from players who only bet when they have it.
• •Tilt sessions — a handful of emotional sessions erasing weeks of solid winnings (next lesson).

Three more stats worth knowing

VPIP and PFR describe your shape; three more show you where the leaks live. 3-bet % — how often you re-raise someone's open — usually sits in the mid single digits for a solid 6-max regular; near zero means you never punish wide opens. Fold to c-bet measures how often you give up on the flop after calling preflop: very high says you're calling too many preflop hands that can't continue, very low says you're paying people off. WTSD (went to showdown) is how often you take hands all the way; a high WTSD paired with a low win rate at showdown is the calling-station signature in two numbers. These are the conventional ranges quoted among tracking-software users, not solver outputs — treat them as smell tests rather than targets, and always read them alongside your own hands.

Reading your own hand histories

Your poker site exports hand histories — text records of every hand you play. Reviewing them is how you catch your leaks in the act, and the method matters: don't review your big losses (mostly coolers you couldn't avoid). Review the medium pots where you called twice with a weak pair and lost, or open-raised J7s from UTG at 2am. Ask one question per hand: 'knowing only what I knew at that moment, was this decision +EV?' Results are noise; decisions are the signal.

Drill: run a leak report

Manual review has a ceiling — you can't eyeball your VPIP across 5,000 hands. Upload a session's hand histories to the leak report tool and it computes your actual VPIP, PFR, and the pattern stats behind the five leaks above, then flags what's out of line. Do it for one real session this week: most players' self-image ('I'm pretty tight-aggressive') meets a 31/12 reality report. PRO members get unlimited AI-powered reviews and leak reports, but the first look at your own numbers is the habit that matters.