help a feller to loosen up.

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first off, i'm not too experienced so maybe this is a dumb question...i'll thank you in advance for not alerting me to that fact [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

i've played about 5000 hands online...i see the flop about 17% of the time, (around 10% when excluding the blinds) so i guess i'm rather tight...i think i have a decent handle on strategy - i'm only losing a little bit of money and 90% of that is due to dumb mistakes - "heat of the moment" stuff...i know where my leaks are - i just need more practice to plug them...(either that or online poker is rigged. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img] [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img] )

of course, it doesn't take folks long to figure out that i'm tight so my raises don't get much action after i've been at a table for 30 or 40 hands...so i want to loosen up.

how do you play more loose? what i mean is, say (just for example) i'm a guy who only plays the top 5% "best" hands...if i want to play more loose, should i go down the list a bit and play, say, the top 7% best hands? (again, i'm just using those percentage numbers as an example. they don't mean anything.)

or do you looser players do so by mixing things up a bit and playing weaker hands for whatever reason - maybe you're not really systematic about it...maybe you play the best hands and then throw in a few wacky hands, to avoid being labelled "tight"?

so what's a good way for a tight feller to loosen up a bit?

(i realize that how tight/loose to play can be very situational - i'm just looking for general guidelines.)

thanks...