4
min read

Poker Terms Explained - What is VPIP in Poker?

Kyle McCague
Contributor

Question: What is VPIP in Poker?

Answer - Voluntary Put money In Pot

After reading this, however, unless you were already aware of the meaning, you don't have a better understanding of what VPIP is right now. And that is fine because, at Pokercode, we're here to simplify things and make the barriers to entry to develop your game smaller, not greater!

So to elaborate on Voluntary Put money In Pot (VPIP) and its definition...

VPIP is a percentage that shows how often a player voluntarily (when not in the blinds) decides to put money into the Pot.

So you play 100 hands in a session, if you voluntarily decide to put money into the Pot in 30 hands, your VPIP would be 30% for the session.

What is VPIP in Poker - Why is knowing our & our opponent's VPIP valuable?

Someone with a high VPIP likes to play a lot of hands. Of course, we want to have a decent sample size before making these sorts of broader generalisations, but realistically, if someone has a VPIP of 40%+ playing No-Limit Holdem, they don't like to fold pre-flop.

Now we know a player has a high VPIP. What does that mean for us?

When this player is in hands, we can target them when we have big hands trying to isolate and get heads up in pots.

While many players will be folding to big raises pre-flop, we know this player is more likely to stick around. We need to try and build as big a pot as possible pre-flop when we have a big hand and look to fold the weaker parts of our range because the opponent is unlikely to fold.

How do I know mine or my opponent's VPIP?

So VPIP as a metric is only applicable online, but we can use it as a logic point for live play. So we'll look at this question heuristically regarding live poker and, more specifically for online poker.

VPIP for Live Poker

In live poker, unless you want to massively decrease your quality of play by trying to keep tabs of every hand, every opponent plays at a likely nine-handed table, your chances of keeping an accurate VPIP on your opponents is impossible.

That isn't to say, though, that we can't use the fundamentals of VPIP to put our opponents into player type groups.

If we see an opponent calling a lot pre-flop, raising rarely and seeing a lot of flops, we can assume his VPIP is pretty high and adjust accordingly.

Conversely, if we see a player rarely playing hands and when he's getting involved, he's raising most of the time whilst seemingly picking his spots carefully. We can assume his VPIP is pretty low and adjust as we should again.

VPIP for Online Poker

So there are a couple of ways of getting this information online:

  • There is poker tracking software on the market, such as Holdem Manager or Poker Tracker. These will give you the option of a HUD (Heads up Display) on sites like Pokerstars. Working as an overlay onto the poker client giving critical stats on your opponent & yourself, including VPIP.
  • The second option is playing on Pokercode by GGPoker. Smart HUD, a tool within the software, will give you VPIP in real-time. Ensuring you have an accurate representation of VPIP for you & your opponents during your session.
Smart HUD VPIP GG Poker
VPIP in Smart HUD by Pokercode on GGPoker

The common mistake when it comes to VPIP

We've eluded to this already, but there is one thing always to consider when using VPIP to influence your decision making. How many hands have you seen your opponent play?

We might have just sat down at a live table and saw an opponent play the next three hands dealt, or we may be playing online with an opponent showing a VPIP of 45 over 20 hands.

While this may indicate how these players play, it could just be there were dealt a few strong hands over a small sample.

We, of course, can still take this information into account, but we need to tread carefully. The larger the sample size, the more accurate VPIP represents fact.

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