What is a Good W$SD in Poker?

Your figure	What it usually means
Under 48%	The hands you take to showdown are not good enough. Read it with WTSD: a low figure with a high WTSD is a call-down habit, not bad luck.
48–56% guideline band	The usual result of arriving at showdown with a range that is stronger than the one you folded along the way.
Over 56%	Your showdowns win, but a figure well over the band usually means you only get there with the nuts — the value you are missing sits in the hands you folded on the turn.

Your figure

What it usually means

Under 48%

The hands you take to showdown are not good enough. Read it with WTSD: a low figure with a high WTSD is a call-down habit, not bad luck.

48–56%

guideline band

The usual result of arriving at showdown with a range that is stronger than the one you folded along the way.

Over 56%

Your showdowns win, but a figure well over the band usually means you only get there with the nuts — the value you are missing sits in the hands you folded on the turn.

What the stat counts

W$SD is the share of showdowns in which you won money at showdown. The denominator is showdowns, not hands and not flops, which makes it the narrowest denominator on the whole report. Two clarifications. It counts winning money, not winning the pot outright — a split that returns more than you put in on the last street still counts as won by most trackers, and a scooped side pot counts too. It says nothing about how much you won; a showdown that wins a minimum-sized pot and one that wins a stack are the same event, which is why W$SD can look healthy while the money goes the other way.

Why the band sits above fifty percent

A showdown is not a coin flip, because you chose which of your hands got there. Every street you fold your worst hands, so the hands still with you at the river are a filtered sample of the ones you started with — and your opponent's are filtered too, which is why the figure lands just above half rather than far above it. The 48-56% band describes that filtering working properly. It is 8 points wide, and the narrowness is doing something: unlike a c-bet frequency, which is a strategic choice, W$SD is mostly an outcome, and outcomes of a sound strategy cluster. If your own figure sits far outside it, the cause is in the streets before the showdown rather than at the showdown itself.

What a figure outside the band means

Below 48%, the hands you take to showdown are not good enough. Read it with WTSD, guideline 22-30%: a low W$SD with a high WTSD is a call-down habit, not variance, and the fix is on the flop and turn where the marginal hands should be leaving. A low W$SD with a low WTSD is rarer and usually means the few showdowns you reach are the ones you were pot-committed into. Above 56% you are winning almost everything you show, which sounds ideal and is not: it means you are folding hands that would have won. The value is hiding in the turn folds, and the honest way to test it is to review the hands where you folded the best hand rather than the hands where you were beaten.

Why it is the slowest stat on the report

W$SD needs about 600 showdowns before a 95% interval on it fits inside the 4-point half-width of the band — more opportunities than any other stat here, because the band is narrow and the underlying frequency is close to a half, which is where a proportion is at its noisiest. Then count how rarely showdowns arrive. At the VPIP band's midpoint you see a flop on about 24% of hands, and at the WTSD band's midpoint you show down about 26% of those flops, so a showdown happens on roughly 6.2% of hands. That puts the sample at around 9,600 hands. Both rates are assumptions taken from the bands rather than from your own play, so treat the figure as an order of magnitude: thousands of hands, not hundreds.

Read it as a pair, always

The reason every stats report prints WTSD and W$SD side by side is that neither is interpretable alone. High WTSD with low W$SD is the commonest losing pattern at micro stakes: too many showdowns, too few of them good. Low WTSD with high W$SD is the nit's version, safe and expensive. Both in band is the boring, profitable shape. Nothing in this pair tells you whether you are winning money — that is bb/100, which deliberately has no band at all, because it needs tens of thousands of hands before it means anything.

Check your own figure

The free leak report computes W$SD and WTSD together from a hand history and marks both against these bands, with the flop and preflop stats that explain them. If you want to know what your overall win rate is doing rather than your showdowns, the win rate calculator gives a confidence interval for the sample you actually have.