Five-phase reservation protocol (FPRP) is a contention-based media access control protocol for wireless ad hoc networks. FPRP uses a five-phase reservation process to establish slot assignments based on time division multiple access. It allows a node to reserve only one slot in an information frame. Once a node has reserved a slot, it will cease contending for other slots. As a result, there may be less contending nodes in the remaining slots, so the time slots in an information frame are not fully used by FPRP. To improve time slot utilization, this paper proposes an improved pseudo-Bayesian algorithm, based on which an improved contention access mechanism for FPRP is proposed, in which nodes are allowed to contend for more than one slot in a reservation frame according to a certain probability/priority. Simulation results indicate that the proposed mechanism performs better than FPRP in time slot utilization and hence the network throughput under various scenarios.